Bazin Andre - What Is Cinema Volume 1

WHAT IS
CINEMA?

essays selected and translated by HUGH GRAY

VOLUME I

WHAT IS CINEMA?

WHAT IS CINEMA?

by ANDRE BAZIN

essays selected and translated
by HUGH GRAY

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, LTD.

London, England

Copyright © 1967 by The Regents of the University of California

ISBN: 0-520-4)0091-9 (cloth-bound)
0-520-00092-7 (paper-bound)

Library of Congress Catalog Card No.: 67-18899

The original edition from which this translation has
been made was published in Paris by Editions du Cerf,
under the title Que-est-ce que le Cinema? This work
appeared, in four volumes, 1958-1965. The essay*
in this first English edition were selected by the
translator, and are published by arrangement with
Editions du Cerf. All rights reserved.

11 12 13 14 15

FOREWORD

by Jean Renoir

In the days when kings were kings, when they washed the feet of
the poor and, by the simple act of passing by, healed those afflicted
with scrofula, there were poets to confirm their belief in their great-
ness. Not infrequently the singer was greater than the object of his
singing. This is where Bazin stands vis-a-vis the cinema. But that
part of the story has to do only with what lies ahead. What is going
on now is simply the assembling of materials. Civilization is but a
sieve through the holes of which there passes the discard. The good
remains. I am convinced that in Villon's day poets abounded on
the banks of the Seine. Where are they now? Who were they? No
one knows. But Villon is there still, large as life.

Our children and our grandchildren will have an invaluable
source of help in sorting through the remains of the past. They will
have Bazin alongside them. For that king of our time, the cinema,
has likewise its poet. A modest fellow, sickly, slowly and prematurely
dying, he it was who gave the patent of royalty to the cinema just as
the poets of the past had crowned their kings. That king on whose
brow he has placed a crown of glory is all the greater for having
been stripped by him of the falsely glittering robes that hampered

v

Foreword

its progress. It is, thanks to him, a royal personage rendered healthy,
cleansed of its parasites, fined down — a king of quality — that our
grandchildren will delight to come upon. And in that same moment
they will also discover its poet. They will discover Andre Bazin,
discover too, as I have discovered, that only too often, the singer
has once more risen above the object of his song.

There is no doubt about the influence that Bazin will have in
the years to come. His writings will survive even if the cinema does
not. Perhaps future generations will only know of its existence
through his writings. Men will try to imagine a screen, with horses
galloping across it, a close-up of a beautiful star, or the rolling eye
of a dying hero, and each will interpret these things in his own way.
But they will all agree on one thing, namely, the high quality of
What is Cinema? This will be true even should these pages — saved
from the wreckage — speak to us only of an art that is gone, just as
archaeological remains bring to light the objects of cults that we are
incapable any longer of imagining.

There is, then, no doubt as to Bazin's influence on the future. Let
me say however that it is for his influence on Ms contemporaries that
I hold him so deep in my affections. He made us feel that our
trade was a noble one much in the same way that the saints of old
persuaded the slave of the value of his humanity.

It is our good fortune to have Hugh Gray as the translator of
these essays. It was a difficult task. Hugh Gray solved the problem
by allowing himself to become immersed in Bazin — something that
called for considerable strength of personality. Luckily alike for the
translator, for the author, and for us, Bazin and Gray belong to the
same spiritual family. Through the pages that follow they invite us,
too, to become its adopted children.

vi

CONTENTS

Introduction 1

The Ontology of the Photographic Image 9

The Myth of Total Cinema 17

The Evolution of the Language of Cinema 23

The Virtues and Limitations of Montage 41

In Defense of Mixed Cinema 53

Theater and Cinema 76

Part One 76

Part Two 95

Le Journal d'un cure de campagne and the

Stylistics of Robert Bresson 125

Charlie Chaplin 144

Cinema and Exploration 154

Painting and Cinema 164

Notes 173

Index 179

INTRODUCTION

By Hugh Gray

it is nearly nine years since Andre* Bazin died, but the critical
insight that illuminates his writings has not grown dim with the years.
It continues to shine forth in its very personal way, and the argu-
ments through which he diffused it offer a brilliant example of a
combination of the critical spirit and the spirit of synthesis, each
operating with equal force. Bazin's thought, while rooted in a rich
cultural tradition, produces conclusions that at times are forcefully
expressed in terms drawn from contemporary science — an ambiva-
lence which contributes markedly to his style and as markedly to
the problems of a translator. Scattered among allusions drawn from
literature, poetry, philosophy, and religion are analogies from
chemistry, electricity, geology, psychology, and physics. Indeed,
there are moments when one pictures Bazin as a poet in dungarees.
Then again there are moments when one is aware of the teacher he
was trained to be, was denied the opportunity to be (inside the
classroom), yet has succeeded in being both in France and abroad.
Those who, so to speak, had the good fortune to sit at his feet, tell
us that what remains on paper is but a fragment of his wondrous
discourse.

1

What Is Cinema?

Andre Bazin was born on April 18, 1918, at Angers. He received
his early schooling at La Rochelle, where he was taken at the age of
five. Destined for the teaching profession, he entered training col-
lege first at La Rochelle and subsequently studied at Versailles.
Then, in 1938, he transferred to the £cole Normale Superieure at St.
Cloud. He completed his studies there with a brilliant qualifying
examination but, because of a stammer, was eventually refused a
teaching post.

His intense interest in films seems to date from his early days in
the army, to which he was called in 1939. Guy Leger, his then
companion in arms, recounts that from the very outset Bazin
tended to center his interest on speculative questions relating to
film. "He was already attracted to the study of the true value of the
cinematographic image as well as to the historical and social aspects
of cinema. At that time, when the world seemed to be going to
extremes in another direction, we turned to motion pictures as an
escape from the 'phony war.' " What Guy Leger here says concern-
ing their common interest is a foreshadowing of what was repeated
constantly throughout the years by everyone who knew and shared
his interest in the cinema. "What had been for me up to then only a
pastime now began to appear, under the tutelage of Andre, a prod-
uct of the age of the image, something that needed study if one was
to savor its true flavor and understand its real significance; to make
out its true language and to discover its objective laws."

Another friend, the critic P. A. Touchard, said of him early in
their acquaintance that he found Bazin deeply impressive not only
for his charm and his generosity of spirit but for his prodigious
capacity for critical analysis as well as for an intense poetic sensi-
bility. "No one/' says Touchard, "had a greater command of words
than this man who stammered when he spoke — and who had like-
wise a fantastic appetite for the consumption of scientific, philo-
sophical, and abstract terms. Yet he was in no sense a pedant,
remaining ever in command of the appropriate use of all these
terms."

2

During the war he was a member of an organization — the
Maison des Lettres — which was founded to take care of young
students whose regular scholastic routine the war had disturbed.
There he founded a cine-club which developed out of meetings at
which he defied the Nazi forces of occupation and the Vichy gov-
ernment by showing films they had banned for political reasons.
His passion for the cinema, we are told and can readily believe, was
part of his passion for culture and truth, allied to a moral authority
which gave him the command over others that he exercised over
himself — not only throughout a long inner spiritual conflict but also
throughout a lifelong heroic struggle with the disease that was to
take him off at the height of his intellectual powers. It has indeed
been said that he was something of a mystic, although one would
rather incline to think of him instead as a poet very much of his
time. Always too there was in him that capacity characteristic of
great teachers to bring out what was best in others, well described
by Touchard as a "Socratic capacity to make those who talked to
him seem intelligent to themselves" Indeed one might call him the
Aristotle of the cinema and his writing its Poetics.

At the end of the occupation he was appointed film critic of Le
Parisien Libere. Thus began his formal life as a public critic and
with it the development of a type of reviewing of films the like of
which had not up to then existed. One of his singular achievements
was to be able, without any concessions to popularizing, to make
his insights understood on all levels. It was said of him at the time
that in ten years he would become the outstanding French film
critic. It took him less time than that. To us, his most commonly
known association is with Les Cahiers du Cinema which under his
direction became one of the world's most distinguished film pub-
lications.

Meanwhile his other film activities multiplied, among them an
appointment as director of cultural services at the Instirut des
Hautes fitudes Cinematographiques. He was thus appointed to a
school at last. At a time when the word filmology, now well estab-

3

What Is Cinema?

lished, did not exist, "by his own efforts Bazin created," says Jean-
Louis Tellenay, "a cinematographic culture." Nor can one ade-
quately estimate the actual effect of his work on the cinema itself.
"Andre staggered me," Tellenay continues, "at this time by his
knowledge of a subject which one day, all unsuspected by us,
would become a veritable discipline to be admitted into the halls of
the Sorbonne."

Tellenay is here referring to the Institute of FUmology, as it
came to be known, the philosophy of which was first set forth by
Cohen-Seat in his Essai sur les principes d'une philosophie du
cintma (1958).

To those who hold that the intellect, as represented in the works
of Bazin, divides man from his fellows and separates him off from
the world, one need only offer the verdict of a man who knew
Bazin intimately — Alexandre Astruc. "This theoretician, this intel-
lectual, this idealist, this believer, was considerably closer to the
realities of life and to his fellow man than those who reject the
approach to life of a Bazin." Francois Truffaut, whom he befriended
and whom he helped "probably more than anyone else," found that
even to be scolded by Bazin was a delight, "such a heat did he
generate in his rare moments of indignation. When it was over, one
never said, 'how wrong I was,' only 'how right he is! how terrific!' "

Robert Bresson, as usual highly perceptive, points out a marked
characteristic of Bazin's method. "He had a curious way of taking
off from what was false to arrive ultimately at what was true." In a
sense he was following in this, possibly quite deliberately, the old
scholastic method: to state the thesis and to follow the statement
with a denial before proceeding to the proof. However you see it,
each essay is virtually a scientific demonstration, as Eric Rohmer
points out in his assessment of the first volume of Qu'est-ce que le
cinema? "These pages, each relating to an individual case, are
nevertheless part of the unfolding of a methodical plan which is
now revealed to us. Nor is there the slightest doubt but that it was
so conceived from the beginning, rather than being the outcome of

4

Introduction

a series of afterthoughts. While logic in his unfolding rather than
chronology is his aim, it is strangely significant that the volume
opens with an article on The Ontology of the Photographic Image,
which is one of his earliest pieces. It is this scientific aspect of his
work that I would like to dwell on without underestimating the art
of it," Rohmer says. "Each essay and indeed the whole work itself
fits perfectly into the pattern of a mathematical demonstration.
Without any doubt, the whole body of Bazin's work is based on one
central idea, an affirmation of the objectivity of the cinema in the
same way as all geometry is centered on the properties of a straight
line. Nor does he attempt to fit his basic principles at all costs into
some alien system of aesthetics. They derive solely from his own
thinking. The system followed by critics before him was, usually, to
start with a definition of art and then to try and see how film fitted
into it. Bazin rejects all the commonly accepted notions and pro-
poses a radical change of perspective."

Many might expect that this "theoretician," this "intellectual"
would be among those who deplore the passing of the silent film as
the coming to an end of an art. Not so. For him, sound came not to
destroy but to fulfill the testament of cinema. This is a position that
follows directly from his central theme of the objectivity of cinema
and leads him to reject, at least by implication, those who in the
middle twenties were in search of pure cinema — or as Sadoul calls
it, "the myth of pure cinema." Hence his preoccupation with adap-
tation as it relates both to theater and to the novel, and indeed to
the relation between cinema and painting.

No one, to my knowledge, has challenged Bazin's stature as a
critic but some other critics have had their moments of disagree-
ment with him. Notable among these is Jean Mitry, another re-
spected figure in the realm of film history and aesthetics, whose two-
volume study Esthetique et psychologie du cinema has recently
appeared. Although throughout this work he praises Bazin more
often than he condemns him, he does in fact challenge — and by no
means altogether unjustifiably, it would seem to me — the central

5

What Is Cinema?

concept of Bazin's critical structure, namely the objective reality o:
the filmic image, as well as Bazin's arguments on deep-focus pho
tography. The reader will see how often this use of the camera ii
referred to, and in how many contexts, from a discussion of th<
films of Renoir to an examination of the true role of montage.

In "The Evolution of the Language of Cinema" Bazin speaks o:
the image as being evaluated not according to what it adds t<
reality but what it reveals of it. This Mitry challenges, refusing tc
accept the argument that because the camera automatically regis-
ters a given "reality" it gives us an objective and impartial image ol
that reality. What the camera reveals, Mitry argues, is not the
reality in itself but a new appearance correlated to the world ol
things — what indeed one may call a camera-perception which, ir-
respective of the will of the cameraman, produces a certain "segre-
gation of space," that is to say, a restructuring of the real so that it
can no longer be considered "objective and immediate."

It is likewise on his theory of film objectivity that Bazin bases
his refusal to agree that the essence of theater resides, as Henri
Gouhier puts it, in the physical presence of the actor, thus setting il
apart from cinema in one very basic respect. As a corollary of this
famed argument, Bazin holds that the cinematic image is more than
a reproduction, rather is it a thing in nature, a mold or masque. It is
in this area that I myself find him difficult to follow. Here for once
perhaps he goes beyond the realm of fact into the brilliantly
created world of the "ben trovato."

Of his exuberant enthusiasm for the cinema, however, no better
expression is to be found than his description of the film brought
back from the Kon-Tiki expedition. The style of it is quintessential
Bazin. But while there is the ubiquitous paradox, for once no scien-
tific terms are pressed into service. One feels so clearly in reading it
the vivid presence of the raft, the "flotsam" against which the fauna
of the Pacific rub shoulders, their actions recorded in a film
"snatched from the tempest" — a photographic record not so much

6

r

Introduction

( things but of the danger which the camera shared — a film whose
very faults are witness to its authenticity.

If I were asked to name the most perfectly wrought piece of
film criticism that I have ever read I would unhesitatingly name the
essay on the style of Robert Bresson, Furthermore, this essay con-
tains what for me is an unforgettable summing up of the adaptation
of a novel to the screen. Concerning the way Bresson handled
Jacques le jataliste, the novel from which Les Dames du Bois de
Boulogne was derived, Bazin writes: "The sound of a windshield
wiper against a page of Diderot is all it took to turn it into Racinian
dialogue." To this phrase I would apply the one Bazin used to
describe his own delight in the work of Charlie Chaplin. In reading
it one experiences "the delight of . . . recognizing perfection."

Today at last, due in no small part to Andre Bazin, the cinema
is being widely recognized as a serious and important field of study.
Too many for too long, notably in the United States, have preferred
to think of it simply as an avenue of escape par excellence from a
high-pressure life, for which we are ever seeking — a new world, as
it were, to live in. But such so-called paths of escape, pleasant as
they are to wander in, are in reality each but a cul-de-sac. The more
we see the screen as a mirror rather than an escape hatch, the more
we will be prepared for what is to come. Automation, we are told,
will wipe the sweat from the brow and straighten the back of an
Adam hitherto condemned to labor. Then will come the ultimate
confrontation that man has so long avoided on the grounds that he
must first live before he can philosophize. The cinema is capable, in
the right hands, of playing an increasingly important ro]e in this
confrontation. For helping us to understand how or why this can be
so, Andre Bazin may rightly be acclaimed a true visionary and
guide. Supremely he is one of the few who have genuinely helped
to answer the question first asked by Canudo, Delluc, and the other
pioneers of film aesthetics and filmology — What is cinema?

Those of us who in his footsteps are likewise concerned to an-

7

What Is Cinema?

swer this question and who must therefore reach out, as he did
beyond the screen to the realms of history, philosophy, literature
psychology, sociology in search of the answer, and in the proces
add another dimension to the humanities, are particularly in thi
debt of this preceptor.

And now I have certain other debts to pay, first of all to Ma-
dame Janine Bazin who in every negotiation concerned with this
undertaking has been graciousness itself. In addition I wish tc
acknowledge that without the generous help of Jean Renoir, oi
whose genius Bazin was an ardent and outspoken admirer, and o
my colleagues Drs. Madeleine Korol and Gabriel Bonno, I would noi
have been able to render many difficult passages into English. I am
grateful also to one of my students, Senor Markowitz of the Argen-
tine, who assisted me in comparing my English with the Spanish
translation. Finally, I am also deeply indebted to the special num-
ber of Cahiers du Cinema dedicated to Andre Bazin for the facts
and impressions there recorded by his friends.

g

THE ONTOLOGY
OF THE PHOTOGRAPHIC IMAGE

if the plastic arts were put under psychoanalysis, the practice of
embalming the dead might turn out to be a fundamental factor in
their creation. The process might reveal that at the origin of paint-
ing and sculpture there lies a mummy complex. The religion of
ancient Egypt, aimed against death, saw survival as depending on
the continued existence of the corporeal body. Thus, by providing a
defense against the passage of time it satisfied a basic psychological
need in man, for death is but the victory of time, To preserve,
artificially, his bodily appearance is to snatch it from the flow of
time, to stow it away neatly, so to speak, in the hold of life. It was
natural, therefore, to keep up appearances in the face of the reality
of death by preserving flesh and bone. The first Egyptian statue,
then, was a mummy, tanned and petrified in sodium. But pyramids
and labyrinthine corridors offered no certain guarantee against ulti-
mate pillage.

Other forms of insurance were therefore sought. So, near the
sarcophagus, alongside the corn that was to feed the dead, the
Egyptians placed terra cotta statuettes, as substitute mummies
which might replace the bodies if these were destroyed. It is this
religious use, then, that lays bare the primordial function of statu-

9

What Is Cinema?

ary, namely, the preservation of life by a representation of life.
Another manifestation of the same kind of thing is the arrow-
pierced clay bear to be found in prehistoric caves, a magic identity-
substitute for the living animal, that will ensure a successful hunt.
The evolution, side by side, of art and civilization has relieved the
plastic arts of their magic role. Louis XIV did not have himself
embalmed. He was content to survive in his portrait by Le Brun.
Civilization cannot, however, entirely cast out the bogy of time. It
can only sublimate our concern with it to the level of rational
thinking. No one believes any longer in the ontological identity of
model and image, but all are agreed that the image helps us to
remember the subject and to preserve him from a second spiritual
death. Today the making of images no longer shares an an-
thropocentric, utilitarian purpose. It is no longer a question of sur-
vival after death, but of a larger concept, the creation of an ideal
world in the likeness of the real, with its own temporal destiny.
"How vain a thing is painting" if underneath our fond admiration
for its works we do not discern man's primitive need to have the
last word in the argument with death by means of the form that
endures. If the history of the plastic arts is less a matter of their
aesthetic than of their psychology then it will be seen to be essen-
tially the story of resemblance, or, if you will, of realism.

Seen in this sociological perspective photography and cinema
would provide a natural explanation for the great spiritual and
technical crisis that overtook modern painting around the middle of
the last century. Andre Malraux has described the cinema as the
furthermost evolution to date of plastic realism, the beginnings of
which were first manifest at the Renaissance and which found its
completes! expression in baroque painting.

It is true that painting, the world over, has struck a varied
balance between the symbolic and realism. However, in the fif-
teenth century Western painting began to turn from its age-old
concern with spiritual realities expressed in the form proper to it,

10

The Ontology of the Photographic Image

towards an effort to combine this spiritual expression with as com-
plete an imitation as possible of the outside world.

The decisive moment undoubtedly came with the discovery of
the first scientific and already, in a sense, mechanical system of
reproduction, namely, perspective: the camera obscura of Da Vinci
foreshadowed the camera of Niepce. The artist was now in a posi-
tion to create the illusion of three-dimensional space within which
things appeared to exist as our eyes in reality see them,

Thenceforth painting was torn between two ambitions: one,
primarily aesthetic, namely the expression of spiritual reality where-
in the symbol transcended its model; the other, purely psychologi-
cal, namely the duplication of the world outside. The satisfaction of
this appetite for illusion merely served to increase it till, bit by bit,
it consumed the plastic arts. However, since perspective had only
solved the problem of form and not of movement, realism was
forced to continue the search for some way of giving dramatic
expression to the moment, a kind of psychic fourth dimension that
could suggest life in the tortured immobility of baroque art.*

The great artists, of course, have always been able to combine
the two tendencies. They have allotted to each its proper place in
the hierarchy of things, holding reality at their command and mold-
ing it at will into the fabric of their art. Nevertheless, the fact
remains that we are faced with two essentially different phenomena
and these any objective critic must view separately if he is to un-
derstand the evolution of the pictorial. The need for illusion has not
ceased to trouble the heart of painting since the sixteenth century.
It is a purely mental need, of itself nonaesthetic, the origins of
which must be sought in the proclivity of the mind towards magic.
However, it is a need the pull of which has been strong enough to
have seriously upset the equilibrium of the plastic arts.

* It would be interesting from this point of view to study, in the illustrated
magazines of 1890-1910, the rivalry between photographic reporting and the
use of drawings. The latter, in particular, satisfied the baroque need for the
dramatic. A feeling for the photographic document developed only gradually.

11

What Is Cinema?

The quarrel over realism in art stems from a misunderstanding,
from a confusion between the aesthetic and the psychological; be-
tween true realism, the need that is to give significant expression to
the world both concretely and its essence, and the pseudorealism of
a deception aimed at fooling the eye (or for that matter the mind);
a pseudorealism content in other words with illusory appearances.*
That is why medieval art never passed through this crisis; simul-
taneously vividly realistic and highly spiritual, it knew nothing of
the drama that came to light as a consequence of technical develop-
ments. Perspective was the original sin of Western painting.

It was redeemed from sin by Niepce and Lumiere. In achiev-
ing the aims of baroque art, photography has freed the plastic arts
from their obsession with likeness. Painting was forced, as it turned
out, to offer us illusion and this illusion was reckoned sufficient unto
art. Photography and the cinema on the other hand are discoveries
that satisfy, once and for all and in its very essence, our obsession
with realism.

No matter how skillful the painter, his work was always in fee to
an inescapable subjectivity. The fact that a human hand intervened
cast a shadow of doubt over the image. Again, the essential factor
in the transition from the baroque to photography is not the per-
fecting of a physical process (photography will long remain the
inferior of painting in the reproduction of color); rather does it lie
in a psychological fact, to wit, in completely satisfying our appetite
for illusion by a mechanical reproduction in the making of which
man plays no part. The solution is not to be found in the result
achieved but in the way of achieving it.f

* Perhaps the Communists, before they attach too much importance to ex-
pressionist realism, should stop talking about it in a way more suitable to the
eighteenth century, before there were such things as photography or cin-
ema. Maybe it does not really matter if Russian painting is second-rate pro-
vided Russia gives us first-rate cinema. Eisenstein is her Tintoretto.

t There is room, nevertheless, for a study of the psychology of the lesser
plastic arts, the molding of death masks for example, which likewise involves a
certain automatic process. One might consider photography in this sense as a
molding, the taking of an impression, by the manipulation of light.

12

The Ontology of the Photographic Image

This is why the conflict between style and likeness is a relatively
modern phenomenon of which there is no trace before the inven-
tion of the sensitized plate. Clearly the fascinating objectivity of
Chardin is in no sense that of the photographer. The nineteenth
century saw the real beginnings of the crisis of realism of which
Picasso is now the mythical central figure and which put to the test
a t one and the same time the conditions determining the formal
existence of the plastic arts and their sociological roots. Freed from
the "resemblance complex," the modern painter abandons it to the
masses who, henceforth, identify resemblance on the one hand with
photography and on the other with the kind of painting which is
related to photography.

Originality in photography as distinct from originality in paint-
ing lies in the essentially objective character of photography. [Bazin
here makes a point of the fact that the lens, the basis of photogra-
phy, is in French called the "objectify" a nuance that is lost in
English, — Tr.] For the first time, between the originating object
and its reproduction there intervenes only the instrumentality of a
nonliving agent. For the first time an image of the world is formed
automatically, without the creative intervention of man. The per-
sonality of the photographer enters into the proceedings only in his
selection of the object to be photographed and by way of the
purpose he has in mind. Although the final result may reflect some-
thing of his personality, this does not play the same role as is played
by that of the painter. All the arts are based on the presence of
man, only photography derives an advantage from his absence.
Photography affects us like a phenomenon in nature, like a flower
or a snowflake whose vegetable or earthly origins are an insep-
arable part of their beauty.

This production by automatic means has radically affected our
Psychology of the image. The objective nature of photography con-
fers on it a quality of credibility absent from all other picture-
making. In spite of any objections our critical spirit may offer, we
a re forced to accept as real the existence of the object reproduced,

13

What Is Cinema?

actually represented, set before us, that Is to say, in time and space.
Photography enjoys a certain advantage in virtue of this transfer-
ence of reality from the thing to its reproduction.*

A very faithful drawing may actually tell us more about the
model but despite the promptings of our critical intelligence it will
never have the irrational power of the photograph to bear away our
faith.

Besides, painting is, after all, an inferior way of making like-
nesses, an ersatz of the processes of reproduction. Only a photo-
graphic lens can give us the kind of image of the object that is
capable of satisfying the deep need man has to substitute for it
something more than a mere approximation, a kind of decal or
transfer. The photographic image is the object itself, the object
freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it. No
matter how fuzzy, distorted, or discolored, no matter how lacking
in documentary value the image may be, it shares, by virtue of the
very process of its becoming, the being of the model of which it is
the reproduction; it is the model.

Hence the charm of family albums. Those grey or sepia
shadows, phanton^ke and a.mos. undecipheraHe, are no long*
traditional family portraits but rather the disturbing presence of
lives halted at a set moment in their duration, freed from their
destiny; not, however, by the prestige of art but by the power of an
impassive mechanical process: for photography does not create
eternity, as art does, it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its
proper corruption.

Viewed in this perspective, the cinema is objectivity in time.
The film is no longer content to preserve the object, enshrouded as
it were in an instant, as the bodies of insects are preserved intact,
out of the distant past, in amber. The film delivers baroque art from

* Here one should really examine the psychology of relics and souvenirs
which likewise enjoy the advantages of a transfer of reality stemming from
the- "mummy-complex." Let us merely note in passing that the Holy Shroud
of Turin combines the features alike of relic and photograph.

14

The Ontology of the Photographic Image

its convulsive catalepsy. Now, for the first time, the image of things
is likewise the image of their duration, change mummified as it
were. Those categories of resemblance which determine the species
photographic image likewise, then, determine the character of its
aesthetic as distinct from that of painting.*

The aesthetic qualities of photography are to be sought in its
power to lay bare the realities. It is not for me to separate off, in the
complex fabric of the objective world, here a reflection on a damp
sidewalk, there the gesture of a child. Only the impassive lens,
stripping its object of all those ways of seeing it, those piled-up
preconceptions, that spiritual dust and grime with which my eyes
have covered it, is able to present it in all its virginal purity to
my attention and consequently to my love. By the power of pho-
tography, the natural image of a world that we neither know nor
can see, nature at last does more than imitate art: she imitates the
artist.

Photography can even surpass art in creative power. The
aesthetic world of the painter is of a different kind from that of the
world about him. Its boundaries enclose a substantially and essen-
tially different microcosm. The photograph as such and the object
in itself share a common being, after the fashion of a fingerprint.
Wherefore, photography actually contributes something to the
order of natural creation instead of providing a substitute for it.
The surrealists had an inkling of this when they looked to the
photographic plate to provide them with their monstrosities and for
this reason: the surrealist does not consider his aesthetic purpose
and the mechanical effect of the image on our imaginations as
things apart. For him, the logical distinction between what is im-
aginary and what is real tends to disappear. Every image is to be

* I use the term category here in the sense attached to it by M. Gouhier
in his book on the theater in which he distinguishes between the dramatic and
the aesthetic categories. Just as dramatic tension has no artistic value, Xht per-
fection of a reproduction is not to be identified with beauty. It constitutes
rather the prime matter, so to speak, on which the artistic fact is recorded.

15

What Is Cinema?

seen as an object and every object as an image. Hence photograpl
ranks high in the order of surrealist creativity because it produq
an image that is a reality of nature, namely, an hallucination that
also a fact. The fact that surrealist painting combines tricks <
visual deception with meticulous attention to detail substantia^
this.

So, photography is clearly the most important event in the hi:
tory of plastic arts. Simultaneously a liberation and a fulfillmen
it has freed Western painting, once and for all, from its obsessio
with realism and allowed it to recover its aesthetic autonomy
Impressionist realism, offering science as an alibi, is at tl
opposite extreme from eye-deceiving trickery. Only when fon
ceases to have any imitative value can it be swallowed up in coloi
So, when form, in the person of Cezanne, once more regains pos
session of the canvas there is no longer any question of the illusion
of the geometry of perspective. The painting, being confronted i
the mechanically produced image with a competitor able to reac
out beyond baroque resemblance to the very identity of the mode
was compelled into the category of object. Henceforth Pascal's cor
demnation of painting is itself rendered vain since the photograp
allows us on the one hand to admire in reproduction something ths
our eyes alone could not have taught us to love, and on the other, t
admire the painting as a thing in itself whose relation to somethin
in nature has ceased to be the justification for its existence.

On the other hand, of course, cinema is also a language.

16

THE MYTH OF TOTAL CINEMA

paradoxically enough, the impression left on the reader by
Georges SadouTs admirable book on the origins of the cinema is of
a reversal, in spite of the author's Marxist views, of the relations
between an economic and technical evolution and the imagination
of those carrying on the search. The way things happened seems to
call for a reversal of the historical order of causality, which goes
from the economic infrastructure to the ideological superstructure,
and for us to consider the basic technical discoveries as fortunate
accidents but essentially second in importance to the preconceived
ideas of the inventors. The cinema is an idealistic phenomenon. The
concept men had of it existed so to speak fully armed in their
minds, as if in some platonic heaven, and what strikes us most of all
is the obstinate resistance of matter to ideas rather than of any help
offered by techniques to the imagination of the researchers.

Furthermore, the cinema owes virtually nothing to the scientific
spirit. Its begetters are in no sense savants, except for Marey, but it
is significant that he was only interested in analyzing movement
a nd not in reconstructing it. Even Edison is basically only a do-it-
yourself man of genius, a giant of the concours Lepine. Niepce,
Muybridge, Leroy, Joly, Demeny, even Louis Lumiere himself, are
^ monomaniacs, men driven by an impulse, do-it-yourself men or

17

What Is Cinema?

at best ingenious industrialists. As for the wonderful, the sublime E.
Reynaud, who can deny that his animated drawings are the result
of an unremitting pursuit of an idee fixe? Any account of the cin-
ema that was drawn merely from the technical inventions that
made it possible would be a poor one indeed. On the contrary, an
approximate and complicated visualization of an idea invariably
precedes the industrial discovery which alone can open the way
to its practical use. Thus if it is evident to us today that the cinema
even at its most elementary stage needed a transparent, flexible,
and resistant base and a dry sensitive emulsion capable of receiving
an image instantly — everything else being a matter of setting in
order a mechanism far less complicated than an eighteenth-century
clock — it is clear that all the definitive stages of the invention of the
cinema had been reached before the requisite conditions had been
fulfilled. In 1877 and 1880, Muybridge, thanks to the imaginative
generosity of a horse-lover, managed to construct a large complex
device which enabled him to make from the image of a galloping
horse the first series of cinematographic pictures. However to get
this result he had to be satisfied with wet collodion on a glass plate,
that is to say, with just one of the three necessary elements —
namely instantaneity, dry emulsion, flexible base. After the dis-
covery of gelatino-bromide of sDver but before the appearance on
the market of the first celluloid reels, Marey had made a genuine
camera which used glass plates. Even after the appearance of cellu-
loid strips Lumiere tried to use paper film.

Once more let us consider here only the final and complete form
of the photographic cinema. The synthesis of simple movements
studied scientifically by Plateau had no need to wait upon the in-
dustrial and economic developments of the nineteenth century. As
Sadoul correctly points out, nothing had stood in the way, from
antiquity, of the manufacture of a phenakistoscope or a zootrope. It
is true that here the labors of that genuine savant Plateau were at
the origin of the many inventions that made the popular use of his
discovery possible. But while, with the photographic cinema, we

18

The Myth of Total Cinema

have cause for some astonishment that the discovery somehow pre-
cedes the technical conditions necessary to its existence, we must
here explain, on the other hand, how it was that the invention took
50 long to emerge, since all the prerequisites had been assembled
and the persistence of the image on the retina had been known for
a long time. It might be of some use to point out that although the
two were not necessarily connected scientifically, the efforts of Pla-
teau are pretty well contemporary with those of Nicephore Niepce,
as if the attention of researchers had waited to concern itself with
synthesizing movement until chemistry quite independently of op-
tics had become concerned, on its part, with the automatic fixing of
the image.*

I emphasize the fact that this historical coincidence can appar-
ently in no way be explained on grounds of scientific, economic, or
industrial evolution. The photographic cinema could just as well
have grafted itself onto a phenakistoscope foreseen as long ago as
the sixteenth century. The delay in the invention of the latter is as
disturbing a phenomenon as the existence of the precursors of the
former.

But if we examine their work more closely, the direction of their
research is manifest in the instruments themselves, and, even more
undeniably, in their writings and commentaries we see that these
precursors were indeed more like prophets. Hurrying past the vari-

* The frescoes or bas-reliefs of Egypt indicate a desire to analyze rather
than to synthesize movement. As for the automatons of the eighteenth century
their relation to cinema is like the relation of painting to photography. What-
ever the truth of the matter and even if the automatons from the time of
Descartes and Pascal on foreshadowed the machines of the nineteenth cen-
tury, it is no different from the way that trompe-l'oeil in painting attested to a
chronic taste for likeness. But the technique of trompe-l'oeil did nothing to ad-
vance optics and the chemistry of photography; it confined itself, if I can use
the expression, to "playing the monkey" to them by anticipation.

Besides, just as the word indicates, the aesthetic of trompe-l'oeil in the
eighteenth century resided more in illusion than in realism, that is to say, in a
lie rather than the truth. A statue painted on a wall should look as if it were
standing on a pedestal in space. To some extent, this is what the early cinema
was aiming at, but this operation of cheating quickly gave way to an onto-
genetic realism.

19

What Is Cinema?

ous stopping places, the very first of which materially speaking
should have halted them, it was at the very height and summit
that most of them were aiming. In their imaginations they saw
the cinema as a total and complete representation of reality; they
saw in a trice the reconstruction of a perfect illusion of the outside
world in sound, color, and relief .

As for the latter, the film historian P. Potoniee has even felt
justified in maintaining that it was not the discovery of photogra-
phy but of stereoscopy, which came onto the market just slightly
before the first attempts at animated photography in 1851, that
opened the eyes of the researchers. Seeing people immobile in
space, the photographers realized that what they needed was
movement if their photographs were to become a picture of life
and a faithful copy of nature. In any case, there was not a single
inventor who did not try to combine sound and relief with anima-
tion of the image — whether it be Edison with his kinetoscope made
to be attached to a phonograph, or Demenay and his talking por-
traits, or even Nadar who shortly before producing the first photo-
graphic interview, on Chevreul, had written, "My dream is to see
the photograph register the bodily movements and the facial ex-
pressions of a speaker while the phonograph is recording his
speech" (February, 1887). If color had not yet appeared it was
because the first experiments with the three-color process were
slower in coming. But E. Reynaud had been painting his little
figurines for some time and the first films of Melies are colored by
stencilling. There are numberless writings, all of them more or less
wildly enthusiastic, in which inventors conjure up nothing less than
a total cinema that is to provide that complete illusion of life which;
is still a long way away. Many are familiar with that passage from
UEve Future in which Villiers de PIsle-Adam, two years before
Edison had begun his researches on animated photography, puts
into the inventor's mouth the following description of a fantastic
achievement: . . the vision, its transparent flesh miraculously
photographed in color and wearing a spangled costume, danced a

20

The Myth of Total Cinema

kind of popular Mexican dance. Her movements had the low of life
itself, thanks to the process of successive photography which can
retain six minutes of movement on microscopic glass, which is sub-
sequently reflected by means of a powerful Iampascope. Suddenly
was heard a flat and unnatural voice, dull-sounding and harsh. The
dancer was singing the aha and the ole that went with her fandan-
go."

The guiding myth, then, inspiring the invention of cinema, is the
accomplishment of that which dominated in a more or less vague
fashion all the techniques of the mechanical reproduction of reality
in the nineteenth century, from photography to the phonograph,
namely an integral realism, a recreation of the world in its own
image, an image unburdened by the freedom of interpretation of
the artist or the irreversibility of time. If cinema in its cradle lacked
all the attributes of the cinema to come, it was with reluctance and
because its fairy guardians were unable to provide them however
much they would have liked to.

If the origins of an art reveal something of its nature, then one
may legitimately consider the silent and the sound film as stages of
a technical development that little by little made a reality out of the
original "myth." It is understandable from this point of view that it
would be absurd to take the silent film as a state of primal perfec-
tion which has gradually been forsaken by the realism of sound and
color. The primacy of the image is both historically and technically
accidental. The nostalgia that some still feel for the silent screen
does not go far enough back into the childhood of the seventh art.
The real primitives of the cinema, existing only in the imaginations
of a few men of the nineteenth century, are in complete imitation of
nature. Every new development added to the cinema must, para-
doxically, take it nearer and nearer to its origins. In short, cinema
has not yet been inveoted!

It would be a reversal then of the concrete order of causality, at
least psychologically, to place the scientific discoveries or the indus-
trial techniques that have loomed so large in its development at the

21

What Is Cinema?

source of the cinema's invention. Those who had the least confi-
dence in the future of the cinema were precisely the two industrial-
ists Edison and Lumiere. Edison was satisfied with just his kineto-
scope and if Lumiere judiciously refused to sell his patent to Melies
it was undoubtedly because he hoped to make a large profit out of
it for himself, but only as a plaything of which the public would
soon tire. As for the real savants such as Marey, they were only of
indirect assistance to the cinema. They had a specific purpose in
mind and were satisfied when they had accomplished it. The
fanatics, the madmen, the disinterested pioneers, capable, as was
Berard Palissy, of burning their furniture for a few seconds of shaky
images, are neither industrialists nor savants, just men obsessed by
their own imaginings. The cinema was born from the converging of
these various obsessions, that is to say, out of a myth, the myth of
total cinema. This likewise adequately explains the delay of Plateau
in applying the optical principle of the persistence of the image on
the retina, as also the continuous progress of the syntheses of move-
ment as compared with the state of photographic techniques. The
fact is that each alike was dominated by the imagination of the
century. Undoubtedly there are other examples in the history of
techniques and inventions of the convergence of research, but one
must distinguish between those which come as a result precisely of
scientific evolution and industrial or military requirements and
those which quite clearly precede them. Thus, the myth of Icarus
had to wait on the internal combustion engine before descending
from the platonic heavens. But it had dwelt in the soul of everyman
since he first thought about birds. To some extent, one could say the
same thing about the myth of cinema, but its forerunners prior to
the nineteenth century have only a remote connection with the
myth which we share today and which has prompted the appear-
ance of the mechanical arts that characterize today's world.

22

THE EVOLUTION
OF THE LANGUAGE OF CINEMA

by 1928 the silent film had reached its artistic peak. The despair of
its elite as they witnessed the dismantling of this ideal city, while it
may not have been justified, is at least understandable. As they
followed their chosen aesthetic path it seemed to them that the
cinema had developed into an art most perfectly accommodated to
the "exquisite embarrassment" of silence and that the realism that
sound would bring could only mean a surrender to chaos.

In point of fact, now that sound has given proof that it came not
to destroy but to fulfill the Old Testament of the cinema, we may
most properly ask if the technical revolution created by the sound
track was in any sense an aesthetic revolution. In other words, did
the years from 1928 to 1930 actually witness the birth of a new
cinema? Certainly, as regards editing, history does not actually
show as wide a breach as might be expected between the silent and
the sound film. On the contrary there is discernible evidence of a
close relationship between certain directors of 1925 and 1935 and
especially of the 1940's through the 1950's. Compare for example
Erich von Stroheim and Jean Renoir or Orson Welles, or again Carl
Theodore Dreyer and Robert Bresson. These more or less clear-cut
affinities demonstrate first of all that the gap separating the 1920's

23

What Is Cinema?

and the 1930's can be bridged, and secondly that certain cinematic
values actually carry over from the silent to the sound film and,
above all, that it is less a matter of setting silence over against
sound than of contrasting certain families of styles, certain basically
different concepts of cinematographic expression.

Aware as I am that the limitations imposed on this study restrict
me to a simplified and to that extent enfeebled presentation of my
argument, and holding it to be less an objective statement than a
working hypothesis, I will distinguish, in the cinema between 1920
and 1940, between two broad and opposing trends; those directors
who put their faith in the image and those who put their faith in
reality. By "image" I here mean, very broadly speaking, everything
that the representation on the screen adds to the object there repre-
sented. This is a complex inheritance but it can be reduced essen-
tially to two categories : those that relate to the plastics of the image
and those that relate to the resources of montage, which, after all, is
simply the ordering of images in time.

Under the heading "plastics" must be included the style of the
sets, of the make-up, and, up to a point, even of the performance, to
which we naturally add the lighting and, finally, the framing of the
shot which gives us its composition. As regards montage, derived
initially as we all know from the masterpieces of Griffith, we have
the statement of Malraux in his Fsychologie du cinema that it was
montage that gave birth to film as an art, setting it apart from mere
animated photography, in short, creating a language.

The use of montage can be "invisible" and this was generally the
case in the prewar classics of the American screen. Scenes were
broken down just for one purpose, namely, to analyze an episode
according to the material or dramatic logic of the scene. It is this
logic which conceals the fact of the analysis, the mind of the spec-
tator quite naturally accepting the viewpoints of the director which
are justified by the geography of the action or the shifting emphasis
of dramatic interest.

But the neutral quality of this "invisible" editing fails to make
use of the full potential of montage. On the other hand these poten-

24

The Evolution of the Language of Cinema

t j a lities are clearly evident from the three processes generally
fcnov/n as parallel montage, accelerated montage, montage by at-
traction. In creating parallel montage, Griffith succeeded in convey-
ing a sense of the simultaneity of two actions taking place at a
geographical distance by means of alternating shots from each. In
la Roue Abel Gance created the illusion of the steadily increasing
speed of a locomotive without actually using any images of speed
(indeed the wheel could have been turning on one spot) simply by
a multiplicity of shots of ever-decreasing length.

Finally there is "montage by attraction," the creation of S. M.
Eisenstein, and not so easily described as the others, but which may
be roughly defined as the reenforcing of the meaning of one image
by association with another image not necessarily part of the same
episode— for example the fireworks display in The General Line
following the image of the bull. In this extreme form, montage by
attraction was rarely used even by its creator but one may consider
as very near to it in principle the more commonly used ellipsis,
comparison, or metaphor, examples of which are the throwing of
stockings onto a chair at the foot of a bed, or the milk overflowing
in H. G. Clouzot's Quai des orjevres. There are of course a variety
of possible combinations of these three processes.

Whatever these may be, one can say that they share that trait in
common which constitutes the very definition of montage, namely,
the creation of a sense or meaning not objectively contained in the
images themselves but derived exclusively from their juxtaposition.
The well-known experiment of Kuleshov with the shot of Mozhu-
khin in which a smile was seen to change its significance according
to the image that preceded it, sums up perfectly the properties of
montage.

Montage as used by Kuleshov, Eisenstein, or Gance did not show
us the event; it alluded to it. Undoubtedly they derived at least the
greater part of the constituent elements from the reality they were de-
scribing but the final significance of the film was found to reside in the
ordering of these elements much more than in their objective content.
The substance of the narrative, whatever the realism of the individual

25

What Is Cinema?

image, is born essentially from these relationships — Mozhukhin plus
dead child equal pity — that is to say an abstract result, none of
the concrete elements of which are to be found in the premises;
maidens plus appletrees in bloom equal hope. The combinations are
infinite. But the only thing they have in common is the fact that
they suggest an idea by means of a metaphor or by an association
of ideas. Thus between the scenario properly so-called, the ultimate
object of the recital, and the image pure and simple, there is a relay
station, a sort of aesthetic "transformer/' The meaning is not in the
image, it is in the shadow of the image projected by montage onto
the field of consciousness of the spectator.

Let us sum up. Through the contents of the image and the
resources of montage, the cinema has at its disposal a whole arsenal
of means whereby to impose its interpretation of an event on the
spectator. By the end of the silent film we can consider this arsenal
to have been full. On the one side the Soviet cinema carried to its
ultimate consequences the theory and practice of montage while
the German school did every kind of violence to the plastics of the
image by way of sets and lighting. Other cinemas count too besides
the Russian and German, but whether in France or Sweden or the
United States, it does not appear that the language of cinema was
at a loss for ways of saying what it wanted to say.

If the art of cinema consists in everything that plastics and
montage can add to a given reality, the silent film was an art on its
own. Sound could only play at best a subordinate and supplemen-
tary role: a counterpoint to the visual image. But this possible
enhancement — at best only a minor one — is likely not to weigh
much in comparison with the additional bargain-rate reality intro-
duced at the same time by sound.

Thus far we have put forward the view that expressionism of
montage and image constitute the essence of cinema. And it is
precisely on this generally accepted notion that directors from silent
days, such as Erich von Stroheim, F. W. Murnau, and Robert
Flaherty, have by implication cast a doubt. In their films, montage

26

The Evolution of the Language of Cinema

plays no part, unless it be the negative one of inevitable elimination
W 'here reality superabounds. The camera cannot see everything at
once but it makes sure not to lose any part of what it chooses to see.
VvTiat matters to Flaherty, confronted with Nanook hunting the
seal, is the relation between Nanook and the animal; the actual
length of the waiting period. Montage could suggest the time in-
volved. Flaherty however confines himself to showing the actual
waiting period; the length of the hunt is the very substance of the
image, its true object Thus in the film this episode requires one set-
up. Will anyone deny that it is thereby much more moving than a
montage by attraction?

Murnau is interested not so much in time as in the reality of
dramatic space. Montage plays no more of a decisive part in
Nosferatu than in Sunrise. One might be inclined to think that the
plastics of his image are expressionistic. But this would be a super-
ficial view. The composition of his image is in no sense pictorial. It
adds nothing to the reality, it does not deform it, it forces it to
reveal its structural depth, to bring out the preexisting relations
which become constitutive of the drama. For example, in Tabu, the
arrival of a ship from left screen gives an immediate sense of des-
tiny at work so that Murnau has no need to cheat in any way on the
uncompromising realism of a film whose settings are completely
natural.

But it is most of all Stroheim who rejects photographic ex-
pressionism and the tricks of montage. In his films reality lays itself
bare like a suspect confessing under the relentless examination of
the commissioner of police. He has one simple rule for direction.
Take a close look at the world, keep on doing so, and in the end it
will lay bare for you all its cruelty and its ugliness. One could easily
imagine as a matter of fact a film by Stroheim composed of a single
*hot as long-lasting and as close-up as you like. These three direc-
tors do not exhaust the possibilities. We would undoubtedly find
scattered among the works of others elements of nonexpressionistic
cinema in which montage plays no part — even including Griffith,

27

But these examples suffice to reveal, at the very heart of the silent
film, a cinematographic art the very opposite of that which has
been identified as "cinema par excellence," a language the semantic
and syntactical unit of which is in no sense the Shot; in which the
image is evaluated not according to what it adds to reality but what
it reveals of it. In the latter art the silence of the screen was a
drawback, that is to say, it deprived reality of one of its elements.
Greed, like Dreyer's Jeanne a" Arc, is already virtually a talking film.
The moment that you cease to maintain that montage and the
plastic composition of the image are the very essence of the lan-
guage of cinema, sound is no longer the aesthetic crevasse dividing
two radically different aspects of the seventh art. The cinema that is
believed to have died of the soundtrack is in no sense "the cinema."
The real dividing line is elsewhere. It was operative in the past and
continues to be through thirty-five years of the history of the lan-
guage of the film.

Having challenged the aesthetic unity of the silent film and
divided it off into two opposing tendencies, now let us take a look
at the history of the last twenty years.

From 1930 to 1940 there seems to have grown up in the world,
originating largely in the United States, a common form of cine-
matic language. It was the triumph in Hollywood, during that time,
of five or six major kinds of film that gave it its overwhelming
superiority: (1) American comedy (Mr. Smith Goes to Washing-
ton, 1936); (2) The burlesque film (The Marx Brothers); (3) The
dance and vaudeville film (Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and the
Ziegfield Follies); (4) The crime and gangster film (Scarface, I Am
a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, The Informer); (5) Psychological
and social dramas (Back Street 7 Jezebel); (6) Horror or fantasy
films (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Invisible Man, Frankenstein);
(7) The western (Stagecoach, 1939). During that time the French
cinema undoubtedly ranked next. Its superiority was gradually
manifested by way of a trend towards what might be roughly

28

The Evolution of the Language of Cinema

called stark somber realism, or poetic realism, in which four names
stand out: Jacques Feyder, Jean Renoir, Marcel Carne, and Mien
puvivier. My intention not being to draw up a list of prize-winners,
there is little use in dwelling on the Soviet, British, German, or
Italian films for which these years were less significant than the ten
that were to follow. In any case, American and French production
sufficiently clearly indicate that the sound film, prior to World War
jl had reached a well-balanced stage of maturity.

First as to content. Major varieties with clearly defined rules
capable of pleasing a worldwide public, as well as a cultured elite,
provided it was not inherently hostile to the cinema.

Secondly as to form: well-defined styles of photography and
editing perfectly adapted to their subject matter; a complete har-
mony of image and sound. In seeing again today such films as
Jezebel by William Wyler, Stagecoach by John Ford, or Le Jour se
live by Marcel Came, one has the feeling that in them an art has
found its perfect balance, its ideal form of expression, and recipro-
cally one admires them for dramatic and moral themes to which the
cinema, while it may not have created them, has given a grandeur,
an artistic effectiveness, that they would not otherwise have had. In
short, here are all the characteristics of the ripeness of a classical
art.

I am quite aware that one can justifiably argue that the original-
ity of the postwar cinema as compared with that of 1938 derives
from the growth of certain national schools, in particular the daz-
zling display of the Italian cinema and of a native English cinema
freed from the influence of Hollywood. From this one might con-
clude that the really important phenomenon of the years 1940-
1950 is the introduction of new blood, of hitherto unexplored
themes. That is to say, the real revolution took place more on the
level of subject matter than of style. Is not neorealism primarily a
kind of humanism and only secondarily a style of film-making?
Then as to the style itself, is it not essentially a form of self-
effacement before reality?

29

What Is Cinema?

Our intention is certainly not to preach the glory of form over
content. Art for art's sake is just as heretical in cinema as elsewhere,
probably more so. On the other hand, a new subject matter de-
mands new form, and as good a way as any towards understanding
what a film is trying to say to us is to know how it is saying it.

Thus by 1938 or 1939 the talking film, particularly in France and
in the United States, had reached a level of classical perfection as a
result, on the one hand, of the maturing of different kinds of drama
developed in part over the past ten years and in part inherited from
the silent film, and, on the other, of the stabilization of technical
progress, Hie 1930's were the years, at once, of sound and of pan-
chromatic film. Undoubtedly studio equipment had continued to
improve but only in matters of detail, none of them opening up
new, radical possibilities for direction. The only changes in this
situation since 1940 have been in photography, thanks to the in-
creased sensitivity of the film stock. Panchromatic stock turned
visual values upside down, ultrasensitive emulsions have made a
modification in their structure possible. Free to shoot in the studio
with a much smaller aperture, the operator could, when necessary,
eliminate the soft-focus background once considered essential. Still
there are a number of examples of the prior use of deep focus, for
example in the work of Jean Renoir. This had always been possible
on exteriors, and given a measure of skill, even in the studios.
Anyone could do it who really wanted to. So that it is less a ques-
tion basically of a technical problem, the solution of which has
admittedly been made easier, than of a search after a style — a point
to which we will come back. In short, with panchromatic stock in
common use, with an understanding of the potentials of the micro-
phone, and with the crane as standard studio equipment, one can
really say that since 1930 all the technical requirements for the art
of cinema have been available.

Since the determining technical factors were practically elimi-
nated, we must look elsewhere for the signs and principles of the
evolution of film language, that is to say by challenging the subject
matter and as a consequence the styles necessary for its expression.

30

The Evolution of the Language of Cinema
By 1939 the cinema had arrived at what geographers call the
equilibrium-profile of a river. By this is meant that ideal mathe-
matical curve which results from the requisite amount of erosion.
Having reached this equilibrium-profile, the river flows effortlessly
from »^ source to its mouth without further deepening of its bed.
But if any geological movement occurs which raises the erosion
level and modifies the height of the source, the water sets to work
again, seeps into the surrounding land, goes deeper, burrowing and
digging. Sometimes when it is a chalk bed, a new pattern is dug
across the plain, almost invisible but found to be complex and wind-
ing, if one follows the flow of the water.

The Evolution of Editing since the Advent of Sound

In 1938 there was an almost universal standard pattern of editing.
If, somewhat conventionally, we call the kind of silent films based
on the plastics of the image and the artifices of montage, "ex-
pressionist" or "symbolistic," we can describe the new form of story-
telling "analytic" and "dramatic." Let us suppose, by way of review-
ing one of the elements of the experiment of Kuleshov, that we
have a table covered with food and a hungry tramp. One can
imagine that in 1936 it would have been edited as follows:

( 1 ) Full shot of the actor and the table.

(2) Camera moves forward into a close-up of a face expressing
a mixture of amazement and longing.

(3) Series of close-ups of food.

(4) Back to full shot of person who starts slowly towards the
camera.

(5) Camera pulls slowly back to a three-quarter shot of the
actor seizing a chicken wing.

Whatever variants one could think of for this scene, they would all
have certain points in common:

(1) The verisimilitude of space in which the position of the

31

What Is Cinema? \

actor is always determined, even when a close-up eliminates
the decor.

(2) The purpose and the effects of the cutting are exclusively 1
dramatic or psychological.
In other words, if the scene were played on a stage and seen from a .
seat in the orchestra, it would have the same meaning, the episode
would continue to exist objectively. The changes of point of view
provided by the camera would add nothing. They would present
the reality a little more forcefully, first by allowing a better view j
and then by putting the emphasis where it belongs. j

It is true that the stage director like the film director has at his i
disposal a margin within which he is free to vary the interpretation i
of the action but it is only a margin and allows for no modification
of the inner logic of the event. Now, by way of contrast, let us take ^
the montage of the stone lions in The End of St. Petersburg. By ;
skillful juxtaposition a group of sculptured lions are made to look }
like a single lion getting to its feet, a symbol of the aroused masses. \
This clever device would be unthinkable in any film after 1932. As 1
late as 1935 Fritz Lang, in Fury, followed a series of shots of j
women scandalmongering with shots of clucking chickens in a farm- \
yard. This relic of associative montage came as a shock even at !
the time, and today seems entirely out of keeping with the rest of j
the film. However decisive the art of Marcel Carne, for example, in j
our estimate of the respective values of Quai des Brumes or of Le j
Jour se live his editing remains on the level of the reality he is j
analyzing. There is only one proper way of looking at it. That is
why we are witnessing the almost complete disappearance of opti-
cal effects such as superimpositions, and even, especially in the j
United States, of the close-up, the too violent impact of which j
would make the audience conscious of the cutting. In the typical I
American comedy the director returns as often as he can to a shot j
of the characters from the knees up, which is said to be best suited j
to catch the spontaneous attention of the viewer — the natural point j
of balance of his mental adjustment.

32

The Evolution of the Language of Cinema

Actually this use of montage originated with the silent movies.
This is more or less the part it plays in Griffith's films, for example
in Broken Blossoms, because with Intolerance he had already intro-
duced that synthetic concept of montage which the Soviet cinema
was to carry to its ultimate conclusion and which is to be found
again, although less exclusively, at the end of the silent era. It is
understandable, as a matter of fact, that the sound image, far less
flexible than the visual image, would carry montage in the direction
of realism, increasingly eliminating both plastic expressionism and
the symbolic relation between images.

Thus around 1938 films were edited, almost without exception,
according to the same principle. The story was unfolded in a series
of set-ups numbering as a rule about 600. The characteristic proce-
dure was by shot-reverse-shot, that is to say, in a dialogue scene,
the camera followed the order of the text, alternating the character
shown with each speech.

It was this fashion of editing, so admirably suitable for the best
films made between 1930 and 1939, that was challenged by the shot
in depth introduced by Orson Welles and William Wyler. The influence
of Citizen Kane cannot be overestimated. Thanks to the depth of field,
whole scenes are covered in one take, the camera remaining mo-
tionless. Dramatic effects for which we had formerly relied on
montage were created out of the movements of the actors within a
fixed framework. Of course Welles did not invent the in-depth shot
any more than Griffith invented the close-up. All the pioneers used
it and for a very good reason. Soft focus only appeared with
montage. It was not only a technical must consequent upon the use
of images in juxtaposition, it was a logical consequence of montage,
its plastic equivalent. If at a given moment in the action the direc-
tor, as in the scene imagined above, goes to a close-up of a bowl of
fruit, it follows naturally that he also isolates it in space through the
focusing of the lens. The soft focus of the background confirms
therefore the effect of montage, that is to say, while it is of the
essence of the storytelling, it is only an accessory of the style of the

33

What Is Cinema?

photography. Jean Renoir had already clearly understood this, as
we see from a statement of his made in 1938 just after he had made
La Bete humaine and La Grande illusion and just prior to La Regie
du jeu: "The more I learn about my trade the more I incline to
direction in depth relative to the screen. The better it works, the
less I use the kind of set-up that shows two actors facing the cam- 1
era, like two well-behaved subjects posing for a still portrait." The f
truth of the matter is, that if you are looking for the precursor of
Orson Welles, it is not Louis Lumiere or Zecca, but rather Jean
Renoir. In his films, the search after composition in depth is, in
effect, a partial replacement of montage by frequent panning shots
and entrances. It is based on a respect for the continuity of dra-
matic space and, of course, of its duration. )

To anybody with eyes in his head, it is quite evident that the
one-shot sequences used by Welles in The Magnificent Amber sons are
in no sense the purely passive recording of an action shot within the
same framing. On the contrary, his refusal to break up the action, to
analyze the dramatic field in time, is a positive action the results of
which are far superior to anything that could be achieved by the
classical "cut."

All you need to do is compare two frames shot in depth, one
from 1910, the other from a film by Wyler or Welles, to understand
just by looking at the image, even apart from the context of the
film, how different their functions are. The framing in the 1910 film
is intended, to all intents and purposes, as a substitute for the
missing fourth wall of the theatrical stage, or at least in exterior
shots, for the best vantage point to view the action, whereas in the
second case the setting, the lighting, and the camera angles give an
entirely different reading. Between them, director and cameraman
have converted the screen into a dramatic checkerboard, planned
down to the last detail. The clearest if not the most original exam-
ples of this are to be found in The Little Foxes where the mise-en-
scene takes on the severity of a working drawing. (Welles* pic-
tures are more difficult to analyze because of his baroque excesses.)
Objects and characters are related in such a fashion that it is im-

34

The Evolution of the Language of Cinema

possible for the spectator to miss the significance of the scene. To
get the same results by way of montage would have necessitated a
detailed succession of shots.

What we are saying then is that the sequence of shots "in depth"
f the contemporary director does not exclude the use of montage
. — how could he, without reverting to a primitive babbling? — he
makes it an integral part of his "plastic." The storytelling of Welles
or Wyler is no less explicit than John Ford's but theirs has the
advantage over his that it does not sacrifice the specific effects that
can be derived from unity of image in space and time. Whether an
episode is analyzed bit by bit or presented in its physical entirety
cannot surely remain a matter of indifference, at least in a work
with some pretensions to style. It would obviously be absurd to
deny that montage has added considerably to the progress of film
language, but this has happened at the cost of other values, no less
definitely cinematic.

This is why depth of field is not just a stock in trade of the
cameraman like the use of a series of filters or of such-and-such a
style of lighting, it is a capital gain in the field of direction — a
dialectical step forward in the history of film language.

Nor is it just a formal step forward. Well used, shooting in
depth is not just a more economical, a simpler, and at the same time
a more subtle way of getting the most out of a scene. In addition to
affecting the structure of film language, it also affects the relation-
ships of the minds of the spectators to the image, and in conse-
quence it influences the interpretation of the spectacle.

It would lie outside the scope of this article to analyze the
psychological modalities of these relations, as also their aesthetic
consequences, but it might be enough here to note, in general
terms:

( 1 ) That depth of focus brings the spectator into a relation with
the image closer to that which he enjoys with reality. Therefore it is
correct to say that, independently of the contents of the image, its
structure is more realistic;

(2) That it implies, consequently, both a more active mental

35

What Is Cinema?

attitude on the part of the spectator and a more positive contribu,
tion on his part to the action in progress. While analytical montage
only calls for him to follow his guide, to let his attention follow
along smoothly with that of the director who will choose what he
should see, here he is called upon to exercise at least a minimum of
personal choice. It is from his attention and his will that the mean-
ing of the image in part derives.

(3) From the two preceding propositions, which belong to the
realm of psychology, there follows a third which may be described
as metaphysical. In analyzing reality, montage presupposes of its
very nature the unity of meaning of the dramatic event. Some other
form of analysis is undoubtedly possible but then it would be an-
other film. In short, montage by its very nature rules out ambiguity
of expression. Kuleshov's experiment proves this per absurdum in
giving on each occasion a precise meaning to the expression on a
face, the ambiguity of which alone makes the three successively
exclusive expressions possible.

On the other hand, depth of focus reintroduced ambiguity into
the structure of the image if not of necessity — Wyler's films are
never ambiguous — at least as a possibility. Hence it is no exaggera-
tion to say that Citizen Kane is unthinkable shot in any other way
but in depth. The uncertainty in which we find ourselves as to the
spiritual key or the interpretation we should put on the film is built
into the very design of the image.

It is not that Welles denies himself any recourse whatsoever to
the expressionistic procedures of montage, but just that their use
from time to time in between one-shot sequences in depth gives
them a new meaning. Formerly montage was the very stuff of
cinema, the texture of the scenario. In Citizen Kane a series of
superimpositions is contrasted with a scene presented in a single
take, constituting another and deliberately abstract mode of story-
telling. Accelerated montage played tricks with time and space
while that of Welles, on the other hand, is not trying to deceive us;
it offers us a contrast, condensing time, and hence is the equivalent

36

The Evolution of the Language of Cinema
£ or example of the French imperfect or the English frequentative
tense. Like accelerated montage and montage of attractions these
superimpositions, which the talking film had not used for ten years,
rediscovered a possible use related to temporal realism in a film
without montage.

If we have dwelt at some length on Orson Welles it is because
the date of his appearance in the filmic firmament (1941) marks
m ore or less the beginning of a new period and also because his
case is the most spectacular and, by virtue of his very excesses, the
most significant.

Yet Citizen Kane is part of a general movement, of a vast
stirring of the geological bed of cinema, confirming that everywhere
up to a point there had been a revolution in the language of the

screen.

I could show the same to be true, although by different meth-
ods, of the Italian cinema. In Roberto RosseUini's Paisa and
A lie mania Anno Zero and Vittorio de Sica's Ladri de Bkiclette,
Italian neorealism contrasts with previous forms of film realism in
its stripping away of all expressionism and in particular in the total
absence of the effects of montage. As in the films of Welles and in
spite of conflicts of style, neorealism tends to give back to the
cinema a sense of the ambiguity of reality. The preoccupation of
Rossellini when dealing with the face of the child in Allemania
Anno Zero is the exact opposite of that of Kuleshov with the close-
up of Mozhukhin. Rossellini is concerned to preserve its mystery.
We should not be misled by the fact that the evolution of neo-
realism is not manifest, as in the United States, in any form of
revolution in editing. They are both aiming at the same results by
different methods. The means used by Rossellini and de Sica are
less spectacular but they are no less determined to do away with
montage and to transfer to the screen the continuum of reality. The
dream of Zavattini is just to make a ninety-minute film of the life of
a man to whom nothing ever happens. The most "aesthetic" of the
neorealists, Luchino Visconti, gives just as clear a picture as Welles

37

What Is Cinema?
of the basic aim of his directorial art in La Terra Trema, a film
almost entirely composed of one-shot sequences, thus clearly show-
ing his concern to cover the entire action in interminable ckep-focu s
panning shots.

However we cannot pass in review all the films that have shared
in this revolution in film language since 1940. Now is the moment to
attempt a synthesis of our reflections on the subject.

It seems to us that the decade from 1940 to 1950 marks a de-
cisive step forward in die development of the language of the film.
If we have appeared since 1930 to have lost sight of the trend of the
silent film as illustrated particularly by Stroheim, F. W. Murnau,
Robert Flaherty, and Dreyer, it is for a purpose. It is not that this
trend seems to us to have been halted by the talking film. On the
contrary, we believe that it represented the richest vein of the so-
called silent film and, precisely because it was not aesthetically tied
to montage, but was indeed the only tendency that looked to the
realism of sound as a natural development. On the other hand it is a
fact that the talking film between 1 930 and 1940 owes it virtually
nothing save for the glorious and retrospectively prophetic excep-
tion of Jean Renoir. He alone in his searchings as a director prior to
La Regie du jeu forced himself to look back beyond the resources
provided by montage and so uncovered the secret of a film form j
that would permit everything to be said without chopping the
world up into little fragments, that would reveal the hidden mean-
ings in people and things without disturbing the unity natural to
them.

It is not a question of thereby belittling the films of 1930 to,
1940, a criticism that would not stand up in the face of the number,
of masterpieces, it is simply an attempt to establish the notion of a <
dialectic progress, the highest expression of which was found in the;
films of the 1940*s. Undoubtedly, the talkie sounded the knell of a!
certain aesthetic of the language of film, but only wherever it had;
turned its back on its vocation in the service of realism. The sound;

38

The Evolution of the Language of Cinema

film nevertheless did preserve the essentials of montage, namely
discontinuous description and the dramatic analysis of action. What
\l turned its back on was metaphor and symbol in exchange for the
illusion of objective presentation. The expressionism of montage has
virtually disappeared but the relative realism of the kind of cutting
that flourished around 1937 implied a congenital limitation which
escaped us so long as it was perfectly suited to its subject matter.
Thus American comedy reached its peak within the framework of a
form of editing in which the realism of the time played no part.
Dependent on logic for its effects, like vaudeville and plays on
words, entirely conventional in its moral and sociological content,
American comedy had everything to gain, in strict line-by-line
progression, from the rhythmic resources of classical editing.

Undoubtedly it is primarily with the Stroheim-Murnau trend —
almost totally eclipsed from 1930 to 1940 — that the cinema has
more or less consciously linked up once more over the last ten years.
But it has no intention of limiting itself simply to keeping this trend
alive. It draws from it the secret of the regeneration of realism in
storytelling and thus of becoming capable once more of bringing
together real time, in which things exist, along with the duration of
the action, for which classical editing had insidiously substituted
mental and abstract time. On the other hand, so far from wiping
out once and for all the conquests of montage, this reborn realism
gives them a body of reference and a meaning. It is only an in-
creased realism of the image that can support the abstraction of
montage. The stylistic repertory of a director such as Hitchcock, for
example, ranged from the power inherent in the basic document as
such, to superimpositions, to large close-ups. But the close-ups of
Hitchcock are not the same as those of C. B. de Mille in The Cheat
[1915]. They are just one type of figure, among others, of his style.
In other words, in the silent days, montage evoked what the direc-
tor wanted to say; in the editing of 1938, it described it. Today we
can say that at last the director writes in film. The image — its

39

What Is Cinema?

plastic composition and the way it is set in time, because it is
founded on a much higher degree of realism — has at its disposal
more means of manipulating reality and of modifying it from with-
in. The film-maker is no longer the competitor of the painter and
the playwright, he is, at last, the equal of the novelist.

40

THE VIRTUES AND LIMITATIONS OF MONTAGE

(Montage Inter dit. Crin Blanc. Le Ballon Rouge, line Fie pas

comme les autres. )

the creative originality of A. Lamorisse was already apparent in
Bim, le petit dne. Bim and perhaps Crin Blanc are the only two
real children's films ever made. Of course there are others —
although not as many as one would expect — that are suited to a
variety of young age groups. The Soviet Union has made special
efforts in this field but it is my feeling that films like Lone White
Sails are already aimed at young adolescents. The attempts of J.
Arthur Rank at specialized production in this area have failed both
aesthetically and commercially. In fact, anyone wishing to set up a
film library or to compile a series of programs for young children
would be hard pressed to find more than a few shorts, of unequal
merit, and a certain number of commercial films, among them some
cartoons, the inspiration and the subject matter of which were suffi-
ciently childlike; in. particular, certain adventure films. It is not,
however, a matter of specialized production, just of films intelligible
to those on a mental level under fourteen. As we know, American
films do not often rise above this level. The same is true of the
animation films of Walt Disney.

It is obvious that films of this sort are in no way comparable to

41

What Is Cinema?

children's literature properly so called, and of which there is any-
how not a great deal. Before the disciples of Freud came on the
scene, J.-J. Rousseau had already noted that this literature was not
without offense. La Fontaine is a cynical moralist, the Countess of
Segur is a diabolical, sadomasochistic grandmother. It is now ad-
mitted that the Tales of Perrault conceal highly unmentionable |
symbols and one must concede that it is difficult to counter the 1
arguments of the psychoanalysts. All the same, it is certainly not |
necessary to employ psychoanalysis to discover the delicious and ;
terrifying profundities that are the source of the beauty of Alice in i
Wonderland and the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen. These f
authors had a capacity for dreaming that was equal in kind and \
intensity to that of a child. There is nothing puerile about that J
imaginary world. It was pedagogy that invented harmless colors for J
children, but to see the use they make of them is to find your gaze |
riveted on green paradises peopled with monsters. |

The authors of genuine children's literature, then, are only |

rarely and indirectly educators . . . Jules Verne is perhaps the only {

one. They are poets whose imagination is privileged to remain on |

the dream wavelength of chEdhood. 1

That is why it is always easy to argue that their works are in a 1

way harmful and really only suitable for grownups. If what we J

mean by that is that they are not edifying, this is true, but it is a |

pedagogic point of view, not an aesthetic one. On the other hand, I

the fact that adults enjoy them even perhaps more than children is a |
proof of their authenticity and value. The artist who works spon-
taneously for children has attained a quality of universality.

Le Ballon Rouge is already perhaps a little on the intellectual
side and to that extent less childlike. The symbol appears in clearer
outline in the myth, like a watermark. Nevertheless, to compare it with
line Fee pas comme les autres is to bring out, to a marked degree,
the difference between poetry that is valid both for grownups and
children and the childlike things suitable only for children.

42

The Virtues and Limitations of Montage

But it is not from this point of view that I wish to discuss them.
<This article is not strictly speaking a critical study and I shall refer
only incidentally to the artistic qualities that I consider belong to
these works. My intention will be, on the basis of the astonishingly
significant example that they provide, to make a simple analysis of
certain rules of montage as they relate to cinematic expression, and
more specifically still, of its aesthetic ontology. From this point of
view, on the contrary, the similarities of Ballon Rouge and Une Fee
pas comme les autres could very well have been premeditated. Both
are marvellous demonstrations, in exactly opposite ways, of the
virtues and the limitations of montage.

I shall begin with the film by Jean Tourane and show what an
extraordinary illustration it is of the famous experiment of Kuleshov
with the close-up of Mozhukhin. As we know, the naive ambi-
tion of Jean Tourane is to make Disney pictures with live animals.
Now it is quite obvious that the human feelings we at-
tribute to animals are, essentially at any rate, a projection of our
own awareness. We simply read into their looks or into their be-
havior those states of mind that we claim they possess because of
certain outward resemblances to us, or certain patterns of behavior
which seem to resemble our own. We should not disregard or un-
derestimate this perfectly natural tendency of the human mind,
which has been harmful only in the realm of science. Indeed it is
worth noting that today science, as a result of experiments carried
out by distinguished investigators, has rediscovered a measure of
truth in anthropomorphism. An example of this is the language of
bees which, as tested and interpreted by the entomologist Von
Frisch, goes far beyond the wildest analogies of the most unre-
pentant anthropomorphism In any event, the margin of error is
greater on the side of Descartes and his animal-machine than of
Buffon and his half-human animals. But over and above this ele-
mentary aspect, it is quite evident that anthropomorphism derives
from a form of analogical knowledge that psychological investiga-
tion cannot explain, still less refute. Its domain extends then from

43

What Is Cinema?

morality (the fables of La Fontaine) lo the highest form of reli-
gious symbolism, by way of every region of magic and poetry.

You cannot therefore condemn anthropomorphism out of hand
and not take into consideration the level it is on. One is forced to
admit however that in the case of Jean Tourane it is on the lowest
level. At once the most scientifically unsound and the least aestheti-
cally adapted> if his work can claim any indulgence* it is on the
grounds that its quantitative importance allows us to a staggering
extent to explore the comparative possibilities of anthropomorphism
and montage. Thus the cinema can actually multiply the static
interpretations of photography by those that derive from the jux-
taposition of shots.

For it is very important to note that Tourane's animals are not
tamed, only gentled. Nor do they ever actually do the things they
seem to be doing. When they do, it is by a trick, either with a hand
offscreen guiding them, or an artificial paw like a marionette on a
string. All Tourane's ingenuity and talent lies in his ability to get
the animals to stay put in the positions in which he has placed them
for the duration of the take. The environment, the dissimulation,
the commentary are already sufficient to give to the bearing of the
animal an almost human quality which, in turn, the illusion of
montage underlines and magnifies to such ao extent that at times it
makes the impression almost complete. In this way. without the
protagonists having done anything beyond remaining perfectly still
in front of the camera, a whole story is built up with a large num-
ber of characters in complicated relationships — often so complex
that the scenario is confused — and all with a wide variety of charac-
teristics. The apparent action and the meaning we attribute to it do
not exist, to all intents and purposes, prior to the assembling of the
film, not even in the form of fragmented scenes out of which the set
ups are generally composed. I will go further and say that, in the
circumstances, the use of montage was not just one way of making
this film, it was the only way. Actually if Tourane's animals were as
intelligent say as Rin-Tin-Tin and able to do for themselves, as

44

The Virtues and Limitations of Montage

result of training, the bulk of the things that montage here credits
them with doing, the focus of the film would be radically altered.
VVe would no longer be concerned with the story but rather with
the skill of the animals. In other words, it would pass from being
something imaginary to something real. Instead of delighting in a
fiction, we would be full of admiration for a well-executed vaude-
ville turn. It is montage, that abstract creator of meaning, which
preserves the state of unreality demanded by the spectacle.

The opposite is true of Le Ballon Rouge. It is my view, and I
shall prove it, that this film ought not to, nor can it, owe anything to
montage. This is all the more of a paradox since the zoomorphism
of the balloon is even more an affair of the imagination than the
anthropomorphism of the animals. Lamorisse's red balloon actually
does go through the movements in front of the camera that we see
on the screen. Of course there is a trick in it, but it is not one that
belongs to cinema as such. Illusion is created here, as in conjuring,
out of reality itself. It is something concrete, and does not derive
from the potential extensions created by montage.

What does it matter, you will say, provided the result is the
same — if, for example, we are made to accept on the screen the
existence of a balloon that can follow its master like a little dog? It
matters to this extent, that with montage the magic balloon would
exist only on the screen, whereas that of Lamorisse sends us back to
reality.

Perhaps we should digress here for a moment and point out that
by nature montage is not something absolute, at least psychologi-
cally speaking. In its original, simple form, people did not see it as
an artifice any more than did those people at the first showing of
Lumiere's film who rushed to the back of the room when the train
entered the station at Ciotat. But the habit of cinema-going has
gradually alerted audiences and today a sizable portion of the pub-
lic, if you asked them to concentrate a little, would be able to
distinguish between real scenes and those created by montage. It is
a fact that other devices such as process shots make it possible for

T U'live-sr.i'.sLbroihek j 45
J £ f c h i t r t (06) j

two objects, say the star and a tiger, to be seen together, a proxin^']
ity which if it were real might cause some problems. The illusion ?
here is more complete, but it can be detected and in any case, the
important thing is not whether the trick can be spotted but whether :
or not trickery is used, just as Ihe beauty of a copy is no substitute
for the authenticity of a Vermeer. Some will object that there fa
trickery in the handling of Lamorisse's balloon. Of course there ia f
otherwise we would be watching the documentary of a miracle or
of a fakir at work and that would be quite another kind of film.
Ballon Rouge is a tale told in film, a pure creation of the mind, but i
the important thing about it is that this story owes everything to the
cinema precisely because, essentially, it owes it nothing. ■

It is very easy to imagine Ballon Rouge as a literary tale. But no ;
matter how delightfully written, the book could never come up to \
the film, the charm of which is of another kind. Nevertheless, the j
same story no matter how well filmed might not have had a greater s
measure of reality on the screen than in the book, supposing that ';
Lamorisse had had recourse either to the illusions of montage or,
failing that, to process work. The film would then be a tale told
image by image — as is the story, word by word — instead of being ■
what it is, namely the picture of a story or, if you prefer, an imagi- !
nary documentary. \

This expression seems to me once and for all to be the one that i
best defines what Lamorisse was attempting, namely something ;
like, yet different from, the film that Cocteau created in he Sang ]
d'un pocte, that is to say, a documentary on the imagination, in j
other words, on the dream. Here we are then, caught up by our j
thinking in a series of paradoxes. Montage which we are constantly |
being told is the essence of cinema is, in this situation, the literary \
and anticinematic process par excellence. Essential cinema, seen for )
once in its pure state, on the contrary, is to be found in straightfor- \
ward photographic respect for the unity of space. <j

Now we must take our analysis a little farther, since it might \
with reason be pointed out that while Ballon Rouge owes nothing I

i

46 i

The Virtues and Limitations of Montage

essentially to montage, it depends on it accidentally. For, if
kamorisse spent 500,000 francs on red balloons, it was because he
panted to be sure he would not lack doubles. Similarly, the horse
Crin Blanc was doubly a myth since several horses, all looking the
same, all niore or less wild, were shown on the screen as a single
horse. This observation will allow us to give an even more precise
definition of an essential law of film stylistics.

It would be a betrayal of Lamorisse's films, for example Le
Rideau cramoisi, to call them works of pure fiction. Their believ-
ability is undoubtedly tied in with their documentary value. The
events they portray are partially true. The countryside of the
Camargue, the lives of the horse-breeders and the fishermen, the
habits of the herds, constitute the basis for the story of Crin Blanc,
providing a firm and unshakable support for the myth. But it is
precisely on this reality that a dialectic belonging to the realm of
the imaginary, and interestingly symbolized by the use of doubles
for Crin Blanc, is founded. Thus Crin Blanc is at one and the same
time a real horse that grazes on the salty grass of the Camargue
and a dream horse swimming eternally at the side of little Folco. Its
cinematic reality could not do without its documentary reality, but
if it is to become a truth of the imagination, it must die and be born
again of reality itself.

Undoubtedly, the shooting of the film called for a variety of
skills. The little boy that Lamorisse chose had never been near a
horse, yet he had to be taught to ride bareback. A number of scenes
were shot virtually without the help of trick work and certainly
with a considerable disregard for very real dangers. Yet a moment's
reflection is enough to show that if what we see depicted had been
really the truth, successfully created in front of the camera, the film
would cease to exist because it would cease, by the same token, to
be a myth. It is that fringe of trick work, that margin of subterfuge
demanded by the logic of the story that allows what is imaginary to
include what is real and at the same time to substitute for it. If
there had only been one wild horse painfully subjected to the de-

47

mands of the camera, the film would have been just a tour de force,
an exhibition of successful training like Tom Mix and his white

horse,

It is clear what we would lose by this. If the film is to fulfill J
itself aesthetically we need to believe in the reality of what is|
happening while knowing it to be tricked. Obviously the spectator t
does not have to know that there were three or even four horses * -
or that someone had to pull on a cotton thread to get the horse to >
turn its head at the right moment. All that matters is that the '.
spectator can say at one and the same time that the basic material v
of the film is authentic while the film is also truly cinema. So the ;
screen reflects the ebb and flow of our imagination which feeds on a \
reality for which it plans to substitute. That is to say, the tale is %
born of an experience that the imagination transcends. \

Correspondingly, however, what is imaginary on the screen -
must have the spatial density of something real. You cannot there- 1
fore use montage here except within well-defined limits or you run V
the risk of threatening the very ontology of the cinematographic |
tale. For example, a director is not allowed to dodge the difficulty |
of showing two simultaneous aspects of an action by simply using 1
shot-and-reverse-shot. Lamorisse in the scene of the rabbit hunt has \
shown that he clearly understood this. The horse, the boy, and the ■
rabbit are all in the same shot together. However he came near to £
making a mistake in the scene of the capture of Crin Blanc when J
the boy is letting himself be dragged along by the horse. It is of no
consequence that the horse we see dragging Folco in the long shot \
is a double for Crin Blanc, nor even that for that dangerous shot, \
Lamorisse had himself doubled for the boy, but I am embarrassed \
that at the end of the sequence when the horse slows down and finally -

* In the same way, apparently, Rin-Tin-Tin owes his cinematic existence to j
several Alsatians who look like him and are all trained to do all the tricks that
"only Rin-Tin-Tin" can do on the screen. Every one of these actions has to b* ;
completed in reality and without recourse to montage, the latter being used /
only in a secondary sense, in order to contribute to the imaginary power of f
the myth of some very real dogs, all of whose qualities Rin-Tin-Tin possesses. \

48

The Virtues and Limitations of Montage

stops* the camera does not show us, so that we arc in no doubt about
j t that the horse and child are in physical proximity. This could have
been done in a panning shot or by pulling the camera back. This simple
precautionary shot would in retrospect have authenticated all that
had preceded it. To show two separate shots of Folco and the horse
dodges a problem, albeit at this stage of the action with less harm-
ful results, and thereby interrupts the lovely spatial flow of the
action.*

* perhaps I shall make myself clearer by giving an example. In an otherwise
mediocre English film, Where No Vultures Fly, there is one unforgettable
sequence. The film reconstructs the story of a young couple in South Africa
during the war who founded and organized a game reserve. To this end, hus-
band and wife, together with their child, lived in the heart of the bush, The
sequence I have in mind starts out in the most conventional wav. Unknown
to its parents, the child has wandered away from the camp and has found a
lion cub that has been temporarily abandoned by its mother. Unaware of the
danscr, it picks up the cub and takes it along. Meanwhile the lioness, alerted
either bv the noise or by the scent of the child, turns back towards its den and
starts alone the path taken by the unsuspecting child. She follows close behind
him. The little group comes within sight of the camp a! which point the dis-
tracted parents see the child and the lion which is undoubtedly about to spring
at ?nv moment on the imprudent kidnapper. Here let us interrupt the storv for
a moment. Up to this point everything has been shown in parallel montage
and the somewhat naive attempt at suspense has seemed quite conventional.
Then suddenly, to our horror, the director abandons his montage of separate
shots that has kept the protagonists apart and gives us instead parents, child,
and lioness all in the same full shot. This single frame in which trickery is out
of the question gives immediate and retroactive authenticity to the very banal
montage that has preceded it. From then on, and always in the same full shot,
wc see the father order his son to stand still — the lion has halted a few yards
awav -then to put the cub down on the ground and to start forward again
without hurrying. Whereupon the lion comes quietly forward, picks up the
cub and moves off into the bush while the overjoved parents rush towards the
child.

It is obvious that, considered from the point of view of a recital, this
sequence would have had the same simple meaning if it had been shot entirely
in montage or by process work. But in neither event would the scene have un-
folded before the camera in its physical and spatial reality. Hence, in spite of
the concrete nature of each shot, it would have had the impact only of a story
an d not of a real event. There would have been no difference between the
SCP rc t-hot and the chapter in a novel which recounted the same imaginary
e pi"sode. Hence the dramatic and moral values of the episode would be on a
Ver . v mediocre level. On the other hand, the final framing which involved put-
ting the characters in a real situation carries us at once to the heights of cin-
e niatographic emotion. Naturally the feat was made possible by the fact that
tn e lioness was half tamed and had been living before the filming in close con-

49

What Is Cinema?

If one forced oneself at this point to define the problem, it seems
to me that one could set up the following principle as a law of
aesthetics. "When the essence of a scene demands the simultaneous i
presence of two or more factors in the action, montage is ruled out." f
It can reclaim its right to be used, however, whenever the import of j
the action no longer depends on physical contiguity even though
this may be implied. For example, it was all right for Lamorisse to
show, as he did, the head of the horse in close-up, turning obedi- S
ently in the boy's direction, but he should have shown the two of £
them in the same frame in the preceding shot.

It is in no sense a question of being obliged to revert to a single- 2
shot sequence or of giving up resourceful ways of expressing things |
or convenient ways of varying the shots. Our concern here is not f
with the form but with the nature of the recital of events — or to be f
more precise with a certain interdependence of nature and form, f
When Orson Welles deals with certain scenes in The Magnificent $
Amber sons in a single shot whereas in Mr. Arkadin he uses a finely |,
broken-down montage, it is only a change of style and in no essen- |
tial way alters the subject matter. I would even say that Hitchcock's |
Rope could just as well have been cut in the classic way whatever §
artistic importance may be correctly attached to the way he actu- f
ally handled it. On the other hand it is inconceivable that the %
famous seal-hunt scene in Nanook should not show us hunter, hole, |
and seal all in the same shot. It is simply a question of respect for |
the spatial unity of an event at the moment when to split it up §
would change it from something real into something imaginary. |
Flaherty as a rule understood this, except in a few places where, as f
a consequence, there is a failure of consistency. While the picture of |
Nanook hunting seal on the rim of an ice hole is one of the loveliest |

tact with the family. This is not the point. The question is not whether the I
child really ran the risk it seemed to run but that the episode was shot with >
due respect for its spatial unity. Realism here resides in the homogeneity of
space. Thus we see that there are cases in which montage far from being the
essence of cinema is indeed its negation. The same scene then can be poor
literature or great cinema according to whether montage or a full shot is used.

50

The Virtues and Limitations of Montage
12 a ll cinema, the scene of the struggle with the alligator on a
fishing line in Louisiana Story, obviously montage, is weak. On the
other hand, the scene in the same film of an alligator catching a
heron, photographed in a single panning shot, is admirable.

However, the reciprocal fact is also true. That is to say, to
restore reality to a recital of events it is sufficient if one of the shots,
suitably chosen, brings together those elements previously sep-
arated off by montage. It is not easy however to state offhand to
what kind of subject or in what circumstances this applies. I will
confine myself, prudently, to just a few indications. First of all, it is
naturally true of all documentary films, the object of which is to
present facts which would cease to be interesting if the episodes did
not actually occur in front of the camera, that is to say in documen-
tary films that approximate to reporting. Newsreels may also be
included up to a point. The fact that reconstructions of actual
events were acceptable in the earliest days of the cinema is a clear
indication that there has been an evolution in the attitude of the
general public.

The same rale does not apply to didactic documentaries, the
purpose of which is not to report but to explain an event. Of course
in these, too, there is a place for sequences of the first type of
documentary. Take, for example, a documentary about conjuring!
If its object is to show the extraordinary feats of a great master then
the film must proceed in a series of individual shots, but if the film
is required subsequently to explain one of these tricks, it becomes
necessary to edit them. The case is clear, so let us move on!

A much more interesting example is that of the fiction film, rang-
ing from the fairytale world of Crin Blanc to the mildly romanti-
cized type of documentary such as Nanook. It is a question then, as
we have said above, of fictions that do not derive their full signifi-
cance or, at most, only derive their value, from the integration of
the real and the imaginary. It is the aspects of this reality that
dictate the cutting.

Finally, in the case of narrative films that parallel the novel or

51

What Is Cinema?

the play, it is probable that certain kinds of action are not adapted
to montage for their full development. The expression of concrete
duration conflicts with the abstract time of montage as Citizen
Kane and Ambersons so well illustrate. Above all, certain situations
can only be said to exist cinemato graphically to the extent that their
spatial unity is established, especially comedy situations that are
based on the relations between human beings and things. As in
Ballon Rouge, every kind of trick is permissible except montage.
The primitive slapstick comedies, especially those of Keaton, and
the films of Chaplin, have much to teach us on this score. If slap-
stick comedy succeeded before the days of Griffith and montage, it
is because most of its gags derived from a comedy of space, from
the relation of man to things and to the surrounding world. In The
Circus Chaplin is truly in the lion's cage and both are enclosed
within the framework of the screen.

52

IN DEFENSE OF MIXED CINEMA

A backward glance over the films of the past 10 or 15 years quickly
reveals that one of the dominant features of their evolution is the
increasingly significant extent to which they have gone for their
material to the heritage of literature and the stage.

Certainly it is not only just now that the cinema is beginning to
look to the novel and the play for its material. But its present
approach is different. The adaptation of Monte Cristo, Les Misera-
bles, or Les Trois Mousquetaires is not in the same category as that
of Symphonic pastorale, Jacques le fataliste, Les Dames du Bois de
Boulogne, Le Diable au corps, or Le Journal d'un cure de cam-
pagne. Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo simply serve to supply
the film-maker with characters and adventures largely independent
of their literary framework. Javert or D'Artagnan have become part
of a mythology existing outside of the novels. They enjoy in some
measure an autonomous existence of which the original works are
no longer anything more than an accidental and almost superfluous
manifestation. On the other hand, film-makers continue to adapt
novels that are sometimes first-rate as novels but which they feel
justified in treating simply as very detailed film synopses. Film-
makers likewise go to novelists for character, a plot, even — and this
^ a further stage — for atmosphere, as for example from Simenon, or

53

What Is Cinema?

the poetic atmosphere found in Pierre Very. But here again, one
can ignore the fact that it is a book and just consider the writer a
particularly prolix scenarist. This is so true that a great number of
American crime novels are clearly written with a double purpose in
view, namely with an eye on a Hollywood adaptation. Further-
more, respect for crime fiction when it shows any measure of origi-
nality is becoming more and more the rule; liberties cannot be
taken with the author's text with an easy conscience. But when
Robert Bresson says, before making Le Journal d'un cure de cam-
pagne into a film, that he is going to follow the book page by page,
even phrase by phrase, it is clearly a question of something quite
different and new values are involved. The cineaste is no longer
content, as were Corneille, La Fontaine or Moliere before him, to
ransack other works. His method is to bring to the screen virtually
unaltered any work the excellence of which he decides on a priori.
And how can it be otherwise when this work derives from a form of
literature so highly developed that the heroes and the meaning of
their actions depend very closely on the style of the author, when
they are intimately wrapped up with it as in a microcosm, the laws
of which, in themselves rigorously determined, have no validity
outside that world, when the novel has renounced its epic-like sim-
plicity so that it is no longer a matrix of myths but rather a locus of
subtle interactions between style, psychology, morals, or meta-
physics.

In the theater the direction of this evolution is more evident
still. Dramatic literature, like the novel, has always allowed itself to
suffer violence at the hands of the cinema. But who would dare to
compare Laurence Olivier's Hamlet to the, in retrospect, ludicrous
borrowings that the film d'art made once upon a time from the
repertoire of the Comedie Francaise? It has always been a tempta-
tion to the film-maker to film theater since it is already a spectacle;
but we know what comes of it. And it is with good reason that the
term "filmed theater" has become a commonplace of critical op-
probrium. The novel at least calls for some measure of creativity, in

54

In Defense of Mixed Cinema

lis transition from page to screen. The theater by contrast is a false
friend; its illusory likeness to the cinema set the latter en route to a
dead end, luring it onto the slippery slope of the merely facile. If
t he dramatic repertory of the boulevards, however, has occasionally
been the source of a goodish film, that is only because the director
^ a s taken the same kind of liberty with the play as he would with a
novel, retaining in fact only the characters and the plot. But there
again, the phenomenon is radically new and this seems to imply
respect for the theatrical character of the model as an inviolable
principle.

The films we have just referred to and others the titles of which
will undoubtedly be cited shortly, are both too numerous and of too
high a quality to be taken as exceptions that prove the rule. On the
contrary, works of this kind have for the last 10 years signposted
the way for one of the most fruitful trends of contemporary cinema.

"Qa> c'est du cinema!" "That's really cinema!" Georges Altmann
long ago proclaimed from the cover of a book dedicated to the
glorification of the silent film, from The Pilgrim to The General
Line. Are the dogmas and hopes of the earliest fUm criticism that
fought for the autonomy of the Seventh Art now to be discarded
like an old hat? Is the cinema or what remains of it incapable of
surviving without the twin crutches of literature and theater? Is it
in process of becoming an art derived from and dependent on one
of the traditional arts?

The question proposed for our consideration is not so new; first
of all, it is the problem of the reciprocal influence of the arts and of
adaptations in general. If the cinema were two or three thousand
years old we would undoubtedly see more clearly that it does not
lie outside the common laws of the evolution of the arts. But
cinema is only sixty years old and already its historical perspectives
are prodigiously blurred. What ordinarily extends through one or
two civilizations is here contained within the life span of a single
man.

Nor is this the principal cause of error, because this accelerated

55

What Is Cinema?

evolution is in no sense contemporary with that of the other arts.
The cinema is young, but literature, theater, and music are as old as
history. Just as the education of a child derives from imitating the
adults around him, so the evolution of the cinema has been influ-
enced by the example of the hallowed arts. Thus its history, from
the beginning of the century on, is the result of determinants spe-
cific to the evolution of all art, and likewise of effects on it of the
arts that have already evolved. Again, the confused pattern of this
aesthetic complex is aggravated by certain sociological factors. The
cinema, in fact, has come to the fore as the only popular art at a
time when the theater, the social art par excellence, reaches only a
privileged cultural or monied minority. It may be that the past 20
years of the cinema will be reckoned in its overall history as the
equivalent of five centuries in literature. It is not a long history for
an art. but it is for our critical sense. So let us try and narrow the
field of these reflections.

First of all let it be said that adaptations which the modern
critic looks upon as a shameful way out are an established feature
of the history of art. Malraux has pointed out how much the paint-
ing of the Renaissance was originally indebted to Gothic sculpture.
Giotto painted in full relief. Michelangelo deliberately refused any
assistance he might have had from oils, the fresco being more suit-
able to a style of painting based on sculpture. And doubtless this
was a stage quickly passed through on the way to the liberation of
"pure painting." But would you therefore say that Giotto is inferior
to Rembrandt? And what is the value of such a hierarchy? Can
anyone deny that fresco in full relief was a necessary stage in the
process of development and hence aesthetically justified? What
again does one say about Byzantine miniatures in stone enlarged to
the dimensions of a cathedral tympanum? And to turn now to the
field of the novel, should one censure preclassical tragedy for adapt-
ing the pastoral novel for the stage or Madame La Fayette for her
indebtedness to Racinian dramaturgy? Again, what is true techni-
cally is even truer of themes which turn up in all kinds and varieties

56

In Defense of Mixed Cinema

f expression. This is a commonplace of literary history up to the
eighteenth century, when the notion of plagiarism appeared for the
gfst time. In the Middle Ages, the great Christian themes are to be
found alike in theater, painting, stained-glass windows, and so on.

Doubtless what misleads us about the cinema is that, in contrast
t0 what usually happens in the evolutionary cycle of an art, adapta-
tion, borrowing, and imitation do not appear in the early stages. On
the contrary, the autonomy of the means of expression, and the
originality of subject matter, have never been greater than they
W ere in the first twenty or thirty years of the cinema. One would
expect a nascent art to try to imitate its elders and then, bit by bit,
to work out its own laws and select its rightful themes. One finds it
less easy to understand that it should place an increased volume of
experience at the service of material foreign to its genius, as if its
capacity for invention was in inverse proportion to its powers of
expression. From there to the position that this paradoxical evolu-
tion is a form of decadence is but a step, and one that criticism did
not hesitate to take upon the advent of sound.

But this was to misunderstand the basic facts of the history of
film. The fact that the cinema appeared after the novel and the
theater does not mean that it falls into line behind them and on the
same plane. Cinema developed under sociological conditions very
different from those in which the traditional arts exist. You might as
well derive the bal-musette or bebop from classical choreography.
The first film-makers effectively extracted what was of use to them
from the art with which they were about to win their public, name-
ly the circus, the provincial theater, and the music hall, which pro-
vided slapstick films, especially, with both technique and actors.
Everyone is familiar with the saying attributed to Zecca when he
discovered a certain Shakespeare. "What a lot of good stuff that
character passed up!" Zecca and his fellows were in no danger of
being influenced by a literature that neither they nor their audience
read. On the other hand they were greatly influenced by the popu-
lar literature of the time, to which we owe the sublime Fantdmas,

57

What Is Cinema?

one of the masterpieces of the screen. The film gave a new life to
the conditions out of which came an authentic and great popular
art. It did not spurn the humbler and despised forms of the theater,
of the fairground, or of the penny dreadful. True, the fine gentle-
men of the Academy and of the Comedie Francaise did make an
effort to adopt this child that had been brought up in the profession
of its parents, but the failure of their efforts only emphasized the
futility of this unnatural enterprise. The misfortune of Oedipus and
Hamlet meant about as much to the cinema in its early days as "our
ancestors the Gauls" do to Negro elementary school children in the
African bush. Any interest or charm that these early films have for
us is on a par with those pagan and naive interpretations practiced
by savage tribes that have gobbled up their missionaries. If the obvi-
ous borrowings in France — Hollywood unashamedly pillaged
the techniques and personnel of the Anglo-Saxon music hall — from
what survived of the popular theater, of the fairgrounds, or the
boulevard, did not create aesthetic disputes, it was primarily be-
cause as yet there was no film criticism properly so called. It was
likewise because such reincarnations by these so-called inferior arts
did not shock anybody. No one felt any call to defend them except
the interested parties who had more knowledge of their trade than
they had of filmological preconceptions.

When the cinema actually began to follow in the footsteps of
the theater, a link was restored, after a century or two of evolution,
with dramatic forms that had been virtually abandoned. Did those
same learned historians who know everything there is to be known
about farce in the sixteenth century ever make it their business to
find out what a resurgence of vitality it had between 1910 and 1914
at the Pathe and Gaumont Studios and under the baton of Mack
Sennett?

It would be equally easy to demonstrate that the same process j
occurred in the case of the novel. The serial film adopting the ,
popular technique of the feuilleton revived the old forms of the
conte. I experienced this personally when seeing once again

58

In Defense of Mixed Cinema

p eU j)lade's Vampires at one of those gatherings which my friend
Henri Langlois, the director of the Cinematheque Franeaise, knows
kow to organize so well. That night only one of the two projectors
waS working. In addition, the print had no subtitles and I imagine
tkat Feuillade himself would have had difficulty in trying to recog-
nize the murderers. It was even money as to which were the good
guys and which the bad. So difficult was it to tell who was which
that the apparent villains of one reel turned out to be the victims in the
next. The fact that the lights were turned on every ten minutes to
change reels seemed to multiply the episodes. Seen under these
conditions, Feuillade's chef d'oeuvre reveals the aesthetic principle
that lies behind its charm. Every interruption evoked an "ah" of
disappointment and every fresh start a sigh of hope for a solution.
This story, the meaning of which was a complete mystery to the
audience, held its attention and carried it along purely and simply
by the tension created in the telling. There was no question of
preexisting action broken up by intervals, but of a piece unduly
interrupted, an inexhaustible spring, the flow of which was blocked
by a mysterious hand. Hence the unbearable tension set up by the
next episode to follow and the anxious wait, not so much for the
events to come as for the continuation of the telling, of the restart-
ing of an interrupted act of creation. Feuillade himself proceeded
in the same way in making his films. He had no idea what would
happen next and filmed step by step as the morning's inspiration
came. Both the author and the spectator were in the same situation,
namely, that of the King and Scheherazade; the repeated intervals
of darkness in the cinema paralleled the separating off of the Thou-
sand and One Nights. The "to be continued" of the true feuilleton
as of the old serial films is not just a device extrinsic to the story. If
Scheherazade had told everything at one sitting, the King, cruel as
any film audience, would have had her executed at dawn. Both
storyteller and film want to test the power of their magic by way of
interruption, to know the teasing sense of waiting for the continua-
tion of a tale that is a substitute for everyday living which, in its

59

What Is Cinema?

turn, is but a break in the continuity of a dream. So we see that the
so-called original purity of the primitive screen does not stand up
under examination. The sound film does not mark the threshold of
a lost paradise on the other side of which the muse of the seventh
art, discovering her nakedness, would then start to put back the
rags of which she had been stripped. The cinema has not escaped a
universal law. It has obeyed it in its own way — the only way possi-
ble, in view of the combination of technical and sociological cir-
cumstances affecting it.

We know of course that it is not enough to have proved that the
greater part of the early films were only either borrowed or pillaged
hi order to justify thereby the actual form of that adaptation. De-
prived of his usual stand the champion of pure cinema could still
argue that intercourse between the arts is easier at the primitive
level. It may very well be that farce is indebted to the cinema for its
rejuvenation. But its effectiveness was primarily visual and it is by
way of farce, first of all, and then of the music hall, that the old
traditions of mime have been preserved. The farther one penetrates
into the history of types, the more the differences become clear, just
as in the evolution of animals at the extremities of the branches
deriving from a common source. The original polyvalence having
developed its potential, these are henceforth bound up with sub-
tleties and complexities of form such that to attack them is to com-
promise the whole work itself, Under the direct influence of archi-
tectural sculpture Raphael and Da Vinci were already attacking
Michelangelo for making painting a radically autonomous art.

There is some doubt that this objection could stand up under a
detailed discussion, and that evolved forms do not continue to act
on one another, but it is true that the history of art goes on develop-
ing in the direction of autonomy and specificity. The concept of
pure art — pure poetry, pure painting, and so on — is not entirely
without meaning; but it refers to an aesthetic reality as difficult to
define as it is to combat. In any case, even if a certain mixing of the
arts remains possible, like the mixing of genres, it does not necessar-

60

In Defense oj Mixed Cinema

jly follow that they are all fortunate mixtures. There are fruitful
cross-breedings which add to the qualities derived from the par-
ents; there are attractive but barren hybrids and there are likewise
hideous combinations that bring forth nothing but chimeras. So let
us stop appealing to precedents drawn from the origin of the cin-
ema and let us take up again the problem as it seems to confront us
today.

While critics are apt to view with regret the borrowings made
by cinema from literature, the existence of a reverse process is as
accepted as it is undeniable. It is in fact commonly agreed that the
novel, and particularly the American novel, has come under the
influence of the cinema. Let us leave to one side books in which the
influence or direct borrowings are deliberate and so of little use for
our purpose, as for example Loin de Rueil by Raymond Queneau.
The question is whether or not the art of Dos Passos, Caldwell,
Hemingway, or Malraux derives from the technique of the cinema.
To tell the truth, we do not believe it for a moment. Undoubtedly,
and how could it be otherwise, the new way of seeing things pro-
vided by the screen — seeing things in close-up or by way of story-
telling forms such as montage — has helped the novelist to refurbish
his technical equipment. But even where the relationship to cine-
matic techniques is avowed, they can at the same time be chal-
lenged: they are simply an addition to the apparatus available to the
writer for use in the process of building his own particular world.
Even if one admits that the novel has been somewhat shaped by
the aesthetic gravitational pull of the cinema, this influence of a
new art has unquestionably not been greater than that of the the-
ater on literature during the last century. The influence of a domi-
nant neighbor on the other arts is probably a constant law. Certain-
ly, the work of Graham Greene seems to offer undeniable proof of
this. But a closer look reveals that his so-called film techniques — we
must not forget that he was a film critic for a number of years — are
actually never used in the cinema. So marked is this that one is
constantly asking oneself as one "visualizes" the author's style why

61

What Is Cinema?

film-makers continue to deprive themselves of a technique that
could be so useful to them. The originality of a film such as UEs-
poir by Malraux lies in its capacity to show us what the cinema
would be if it took its inspiration from the novels "influenced" by
the cinema. What should we conclude from this? Surely that we
should rather reverse the usual theory and study the influence of
modern literature on film-makers.

What do we actually mean by "cinema" in our present context?
If we mean a mode of expression by means of realistic representa-
tion, by a simple registering of images, simply an outer seeing as
opposed to the use of the resources of introspection or of analysis in
the style of the classical novel, then it must be pointed out that the
English novelists had already discovered in behaviorism the psycho-
logical justifications of such a technique. But here the literary critic
is guilty of imprudently prejudging the true nature of cinema,
based on a very superficial definition of what is here meant by
reality. Because its basic material is photography it does not follow
that the seventh art is of its nature dedicated to the dialectic of
appearances and the psychology of behavior. While it is true that it
relies entirely on the outside world for its objects it has a thousand
ways of acting on the appearance of an object so as to eliminate
any equivocation and to make of this outward sign one and only
one inner reality. The truth is that the vast majority of images on
the screen conform to the psychology of the theater or to the novel
of classical analysis. They proceed from the commonsense supposi-
tion that a necessary and unambiguous causal relationship exists
between feelings and their outward manifestations. They postulate
that all is in the consciousness and that this consciousness can be
known.

If, a little more subtly, one understands by cinema the tech-
niques of a narrative born of montage and change of camera posi-
tion, the same statement holds true. A novel by Dos Passos or
Malraux is no less different from those films to which we are accus-
tomed than it is from a novel by Fromentin or Paul Bourget.

62

In Defense of Mixed Cinema

Actually, the American novel belongs not so much to the age of
cinema as to a certain vision of the world, a vision influenced
doubtless by man's relations with a technical civilization, but whose
influence upon the cinema, which is a fruit of this civilization, has
been less than on the novel, in spite of the alibis that the film-maker
can offer the novelist.

Likewise, in going to the novel the cinema has usually looked
not as one might expect to works in which some have seen its
influence already operating, but, in Hollywood, to Victorian litera-
ture and in France, to Henri Bordeaux and Pierre Benoit. Better
... or worse . . . when an American director turns his attention
on some rare occasion to a work by Hemingway, for example For
Whom the Bell Tolls, he treats it in the traditional style that suits
each and every adventure story.

The way things are, then, it would seem as if the cinema was
fifty years behind the novel. If we maintain that the cinema influ-
ences the novel then we must suppose that it is a question of a
potential image, existing exclusively behind the magnifying glass of
the critic and seen only from where he sits. We would then be
talking about the influence of a nonexistent cinema, an ideal
cinema, a cinema that the novelist would produce if he were a film-
maker; of an imaginary art that we are still awaiting.

And, God knows, this hypothesis is not as silly as it sounds. Let
us hold on to it, at least as we do to those imaginary values which
cancel one another out following on the equation that they have
helped to solve.

If the apparent influence of the cinema on the novel has led the
minds of some otherwise sound critics astray, it is because the novel-
ist now uses narrative techniques and adopts a standard of evalua-
tion of the facts, the affinity of which with the ways of the cinema
are undoubted, whether borrowed directly, or as we prefer to think,
of a certain aesthetic convergence that has simultaneously polarized
several contemporary forms of expression. But in this process of
influences or of resemblances, it is the novel which has proceeded

63

What Is Cinema?

most logically along the pathways of style. The novel it is that has
made the subtlest use of montage, for example, and of the reversal
of chronology. Above all it is the novel that has discovered the way
to raise to the level of an authentic metaphysical significance an
almost mirror-like objectivity. What camera has ever been as exter-
nally related to its object as the consciousness of the hero of Albert
Camus' L'Etranger? The fact of the matter is that we do not know if
Manhattan Transfer or La Condition humaine would have been
very different without the cinema, but we are certain on the con-
trary that Thomas Garner and Citizen Kane would never have
existed if it had not been for James Joyce and Dos Passos. We are
witnessing, at the point at which the avant-garde has now arrived,
the making of films that dare to take their inspiration from a novel-
like style one might describe as ultracinematographic. Seen from
this angle the question of borrowing is only of secondary impor-
tance. The majority of the films that we have presently in mind are
not adaptations from novels yet certain episodes of Paisa are much
more indebted to Hemingway (the scenes in the marshes), or to
Saroyan (Naples) than Sam Wood's For Whom The Bell Tolls is to
the original. By contrast, Malraux's film is the close equivalent of
certain episodes in L'Espoir and the best of the recent English films
are adaptations of Graham Greene. In our view the most satisfac-
tory is the modestly made Brighton Rock, which passed almost
unnoticed while John Ford was lost in the sumptuous falsification
of The Fugitive (The Power and the Glory). Let us therefore see
what the best contemporary films owe to the contemporary novelists —
something it would be easy to demonstrate up to the appearance
especially of Ladri di Biciclette. So, far from being scandalized by
adaptations, we shall see in them, if not alas a certain augury for
the progress of cinema, at least a possible factor in this progress, to
the extent, at least, that the novelist transforms it. Perhaps you may
say that this is all very true about modern novels, if the cinema is
simply recouping here a hundredfold what it has already lent to the
novel, but what is the argument worth when the film-maker pre-

64

In Defense of Mixed Cinema

tends he is faking his inspiration from Gide or Stendhal? And why
not from Proust or even from Madame de La Fayette?

And indeed why not? Jacques Bourgeois in an article in La
Revue du Cinema has made a brilliant analysis of the affinities
between A La Recherche du temps perdu and cinematic forms of
expression. Actually, the real problems to be faced in discussing the
theories of such adaptations do not belong to the realm of aesthet-
ics. They do not derive from the cinema as an art form but as a
sociological and industrial fact. The drama of adaptation is the
drama of popularization. A provincial publicity blurb on La Char-
treuse de Parme described it as taken from "the famous cloak-and-
dagger novel." We sometimes get the truth from film salesmen who
have never read Stendhal. Shall we therefore condemn the film by
Christian Jacque? Yes, to the extent that he has been false to the
essence of the novel and wherever we feel that this betrayal was
not inevitable. No, if we take into consideration first of all that this
adaptation is above the average film level in quality and secondly
that, all things considered, it provides an enchanting introduction to
Stendhal's work and has certainly increased the number of its read-
ers. It is nonsense to wax wroth about the indignities practiced on
literary works on the screen, at least in the name of literature. After
all, they cannot harm the original in the eyes of those who know it,
however little they approximate to it. As for those who are un-
acquainted with the original, one of two tilings may happen; either
they will be satisfied with the film which is as good as most, or they
will want to know the original, with the resulting gain for literature.
This argument is supported by publishers' statistics that show a rise
in the sale of literary works after they have been adapted to the
screen. No, the truth is, that culture in general and literature in
particular have nothing to lose from such an enterprise.

There now remains the cinema, and I personally feel that there
is every reason to be concerned over the way it is too often used in
relation to our literary capital because the film-maker has every-
thing to gain from fidelity. Already much more highly developed,

65

What Is Cinema?

and- catering to a relatively cultured and exacting public, the novel
offers the cinema characters that are much more complex and,
again, as regards the relation of form and content, a firmness of
treatment and a subtlety to which we are not accustomed on the
screen. Obviously if the material on which the scenarist and the
director are working is in itself on an intellectual level higher than
that usual in the cinema then two things can be done. Either this
difference in level and the artistic prestige of the original work
serves as a guarantee, a reservoir of ideas and a cachet for the film,
as is the case with Carmen, La Chartreuse de Par me, or L'Idiot, or
the film-makers honestly attempt an integral equivalent, they try at
least not simply to use the book as an inspiration, not merely to
adapt it, but to translate it onto the screen as instanced in La
Symphonie Pastorale, Le Diable au corps, The Fallen Idol,
or Le Journal d'un cure de campagne. We should not throw
stones at the image-makers who simplify in adapting. Their be-
trayal as we have said is a relative thing and there fs no loss to
literature. But the hopes for the future of the cinema are obviously
pinned to the second group. When one opens the sluice the level of
the water is very little higher than that of the canal. When someone
makes a film of Madame Bovary in Hollywood, the difference of
aesthetic level between the work of Flaubert and the average
American film being so great, the result is a standard American
production that has only one thing wrong with it — that it is still
called Madame Bovary, And how can it be otherwise when the
literary work is brought face to face with the vast and powerful
cinematographic industry: cinema is the great leveler. When, on
the other hand, thanks to a happy combination of circumstances,
the film-maker plans to treat the book as something different from a
run-of-the-mill scenario, it is a little as if, in that moment, the whole
of cinema is raised to the level of literature. This is the case with
the Madame Bovary and Une Partie de campagne of Jean Renoir.
Actually, these arc not too very good examples, not because of the
quality of the films but precisely because Renoir is more faithful to

66

In Defense of Mixed Cinema

the spirit than the letter. What strikes us about the fidelity of
Renoir is that paradoxically it is compatible with complete inde-
pendence from the original. The justification for this is of course
that the genius of Renoir is certainly as great as that of Flaubert or
Maupassant. The phenomenon we face here is comparable then to
the translation of Edgar Allan Poe by Baudelaire.

Certainly it would be better if all directors were men of genius;
presumably then there would be no problem of adaptation. The
critic is only too fortunate if he is confronted merely with men of
talent. This is enough however on which to establish our thesis.
There is nothing to prevent us from dreaming of a Diable au corps
directed by Jean Vigo but let us congratulate ourselves that at least
we have an adaptation by Claude Autant-Lara. Faithfulness to the
work of Radiguet has not only forced the screenwriters to offer us
interesting and relatively complex characters, it has incited them to
flout some of the moral conventions of the cinema, to take certain
risks — prudently calculated, but who can blame them for this — with
public prejudices. It has widened the intellectual and moral hori-
zons of the audience and prepared the way for other films of qual-
ity. What is more, this is not all; and it is wrong to present fidelity
as if it were necessarily a negative enslavement to an alien aesthet-
ic. Undoubtedly the novel has means of its own — language not the
image is its material, its intimate effect on the isolated reader is not
the same as that of a film on the crowd in a darkened cinema — but
precisely for these reasons the differences in aesthetic structure
make the search for equivalents an even more delicate matter, and
thus they require all the more power of invention and imagination
from the film-maker who is truly attempting a resemblance. One
might suggest that in the realm of language and style cinematic
creation is in direct ratio to fidelity. For the same reasons that
render a word-by-word translation worthless and a too free transla-
tion a matter for condemnation, a good adaptation should result in
a restoration of the essence of the letter and the spirit. But one
knows how intimate a possession of a language and of the genius

67

What Is Cinema?

proper to it is required for a good translation. For example, taking
the well-known simple past tenses of Andre Gide as being specifi-
cally a literary effect of a style, one might consider them subtleties
that can never be translated into the cinema, Yet it is not at all
certain that Delannoy in his Symphonie pastorale has not found the
equivalent. The ever-present snow carries with it a subtle and
polyvalent symbolism that quietly modifies the action, and provides
it as it were with a permanent moral coefficient the value of which
is not so different after all from that which the writer was searching
for by the appropriate use of tenses. Yet, the idea of surrounding
this spiritual adventure with snow and of ignoring systematically
the summery aspect of the countryside is a truly cinematographic
discovery, to which the director may have been led by a fortunate
understanding of the text. The example of Bresson in he Journal
d'un cure de campagne is even more convincing; his adaptation
reaches an almost dizzy height of fidelity by way of a ceaselessly cre-
ated respect for the text. Alfred Beguin has rightly remarked that
the violence characteristic of Bernanos could never have the same
force in literature and cinema. The screen uses violence in such a
customary fashion that it seems somehow like a devalued currency,
which is at one and the same time provoking and conventional.
Genuine fidelity to the tone set by the novelist calls thus for a kind
of conversion of the violence of the text. The real equivalent of the
hyperbole of Bernanos lay in the ellipsis and litotes of Robert
Bresson's editing. The more important and decisive the literary
qualities of the work, the more the adaptation disturbs its equilib-
rium, the more it needs a creative talent to reconstruct it on a new
equilibrium not indeed identical with, but the equivalent of, the old
one. To pretend that the adaptation of novels is a slothful exercise
from which the true cinema, "pure cinema," can have nothing to
gain, is critical nonsense to which all adaptations of quality give the
lie. It is those who care the least for fidelity in the name of the so-
called demands of the screen who betray at one and the same time
both literature and the cinema.

68

In Defense of Mixed Cinema

The effective fidelity of a Cocteau or Wyler is not evidence of a
backward step, on the contrary, it is evidence of a development of
cinematographic intelligence. Whether it is, as with the author of
les Parents terribles, the astonishingly perspicacious mobility of the
camera or, as with Wyler, the asceticism of his editing, the refining
down of the photography, the use of the fixed camera and of deep
focus, their success is the result of outstanding mastery; moreover it
is evidence of an inventiveness of expression which is the exact
opposite of a passive recording of theater. To show respect for the
theater it is not enough to photograph it. To create theater of any
worthwhile kind is more difficult than to create cinema and this is
what the majority of adapters were trying to do up to now.

There is a hundred times more cinema, and better cinema at
that, in one fixed shot in The Little Foxes or Macbeth than in all the
exterior travelling shots, in all the natural settings, in all the geo-
graphical exoticism, in all the shots of the reverse side of the set, by
means of which up to now the screen has ingeniously attempted to
make us forget the stage. Far from being a sign of decadence, the
mastering of the theatrical repertoire by the cinema is on the con-
trary a proof of maturity. In short, to adapt is no longer to betray
but to respect. Let us take a comparison from circumstances in the
material order. In order to attain this high level of aesthetic fidelity,
it is essential that the cinematographic form of expression make
progress comparable to that in the field of optics. The distance
separating Hamlet from the film d'art is as great as that separating
the complexities of the modern lens from the primitive condenser of
the magic lantern. Its imposing complexity has no other purpose
than to compensate for the distortions, the aberrations, the diffrac-
tions, for which the glass is responsible — that is to say, to render the
camera obscura as objective as possible. The transition from a the-
atrical work to the screen demands, on the aesthetic level, a scien-
tific knowledge, so to speak, of fidelity comparable to that of a
camera operator in his photographic rendering. It is the termination
of a progression and the beginning of a rebirth. If the cinema today

69

What Is Cinema?

is capable of effectively taking on the realm of the novel and the
theater, it is primarily because it is sure enough of itself and master
enough of its means so that it no longer need assert itself in the
process. That is to say it can now aspire to fidelity — not the illusory
fidelity of a replica — through an intimate understanding of its own
true aesthetic structure which is a prerequisite and necessary condi-
tion of respect for the works it is about to make its own. The
multiplication of adaptations of literary works which are far from
cinematic need not disturb the critic who is concerned about the
purity of the seventh art; on the contrary, they are the guarantee of
its progress.

"Why then," it will be asked by those nostalgic for cinema with
a capital C, independent, specific, autonomous, free of all com-
promise, "should so much art be placed at the service of a cause
that does not need it — -why make unauthentic copies of novels
when one can read the book, and of Phedre when all you need is to
go to the Cornedie Francaise? No matter how satisfying the adapta-
tions may be, you cannot argue that they are worth more than the
original, especially not of a film of an equal artistic quality on a
theme that is specifically cinematographic? You cite Le Diable au
corps, The Fallen Idol, Les Parents terrible.s, and Hamlet. Well
and good. I can cite in return The Gold Rush, Potemkin, Broken
Blossoms, Scarface, Stagecoach, or even Citizen Kane, all master-
pieces which would never have existed without the cinema, irre-
placeable additions to the patrimony of art. Even if the best of
adaptations are no longer naive betrayals or an unworthy prostitu-
tion, it is still true that in them a great deal of talent has gone to
waste. You speak of progress but progress which can only render
the cinema sterile in making it an annex of literature. Give to the
theater and to the novel that which is theirs and to the cinema that
which can never belong elsewhere."

This last objection would be valid in theory if it did not over-
look historical relativity, a factor to be counted when an art is in
fuU evolution, it is quite true that an original scenario is preferable

70

J

In Defense of Mixed Cinema

to an adaptation, all else being equal. No one dreams of contesting
this. You may call Charlie Chaplin the Moliere of the cinema, but
vi'e would not sacrifice Monsieur Verdoux for an adaptation of Le
Misanthrope* Let us hope, then, to have as often as possible films
like Le Jour se leve, La Regie du jeu, or The Best Years of Our
lives. But these are platonic wishes, attitudes of mind that have no
bearing on the actual evolution of the cinema. If the cinema turns
more and more to literature — indeed to painting or to drama — it is
a fact which we take note of and attempt to understand because it
is very likely that we cannot influence it. In such a situation, if
fact does not absolutely make right, it requires the critic at least to
be favorably predisposed. Once more, let us not be misled here by
drawing an analogy with the other arts, especially those whose
evolution towards an individualistic use has made virtually inde-
pendent of the consumer. Lautreamont and Van Gogh produced
their creative work while either misunderstood or ignored by their
contemporaries. The cinema cannot exist without a minimum num-
ber, and it is an immense minimum, of people who frequent the
cinema here and now. Even when the film-maker affronts the pub-
lic taste there is no justification for his audacity, no justification
except insofar as it is possible to admit that it is the spectator who
misunderstands what he should and someday will like. The only
possible contemporary comparison is with architecture, since a
house has no meaning except as a habitation. The cinema is like-
wise a functional art. If we take another system of reference we
must say of the cinema that its existence precedes its essence; even
in his most adventurous extrapolations, it is this existence from
which the critic must take his point of departure. As in history, and
with approximately the same reservations, the verification of a
change goes beyond reality and already postulates a value judg-
ment. Those who damned the sound film at its birth were unwilling
to admit precisely this, even when the sound film held the incom-
parable advantage over the silent film that it was replacing it.
Even if this critical pragmatism does not seem to the reader

71

What Is Cinema?

sufficiently well-founded, he must nevertheless admit that it justifies
in us a certain humility and thoughtful prudence when faced with
any sign of evolution in the cinema. It is in this frame of mind that
we offer the explanation with which we would like to end this
essay. The masterpieces to which we customarily refer as examples
of true cinema — the cinema which owes nothing to the theater and
literature because it is capable of discovering its own themes and
language — these masterpieces are probably as admirable as they
are inimitable. If the Soviet cinema no longer gives us the equiva-
lent of Potemkin or Hollywood the equivalent of Sunrise, Halle-
lujah, Scarf ace, It Happened One Night, or even of Stagecoach it is
not because the new generation of directors is in any way inferior
to the old. As a matter of fact, they are very largely the same people.
Nor is it, we believe, because economic and political factors of
production have rendered their inspiration sterile. It is rather that
genius and talent are relative phenomena and only develop in rela-
tion to a set of historical circumstances. It would be too simple to
explain the theatrical failures of Voltaire on the grounds that he
had no tragic sense; it was the age that had none. Any attempt to
prolong Racinian tragedy was an incongruous undertaking in con-
flict with the nature of things. There is no sense in asking ourselves
what the author of Phedre would have written in 1740 because he
whom we call Racine was not a man answering that identity, but
"the-poet-who-had-written-P/iedr*." Without Phedre Racine is an
anonymity, a concept of the mind. It is equally pointless in the
cinema to regret that we no longer have Mack Sennett to carry on
the great comic tradition. The genius of Mack Sennett was that he
made his slapstick comedies at the period when this was possible.
As a matter of fact, the quality of Mack Sennett productions died
before he did, and certain of his pupils are still very much alive;
Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton, for example, whose rare appear-
ances these past fifteen years have been only painful exhibitions in
which nothing of the verve of yesteryear has survived. Only Chap-
lin has known how to span a third of a century of cinema, and this

72

In Defense of Mixed Cinema
because his genius was truly exceptional. But at the price of what
reincarnations, of what a total renewal of his inspiration, of his style
and even of his character! We note here — the evidence is over-
whelming — that strange acceleration of aesthetic continuity which
characterizes the cinema. A writer may repeat himself both in mat-
ter and form over half a century. The talent of a film-maker, if he does
not evolve with his art, lasts no more than five or ten years. This
is why genius, less flexible and less conscious than talent, has frequent
moments of extraordinary failure; for example, Stroheim, Abel
Gance, Pudovkin. Certainly the causes of these profound dis-
agreements between the artist and his art, which cruelly age genius
and reduce it to nothing more than a sum of obsessions and use-
less megalomania, are multiple, and we are not going to analyze
them here. But we would like to take up one of them
which is directly related to our purpose.

Up till about 1938 the black-and-white cinema made continuous
progress. At first it was a technical progress — artificial lighting,
panchromatic emulsions, travelling shots, sound — and in conse-
quence an enriching of the means of expression — close-up, mon-
tage, parallel montage, ellipsis, re-framing, and so on. Side by side
with this rapid evolution of the language and in strict interde-
pendence on it, film-makers discovered original themes to which the
new art gave substance. "That is cinema!" was simply a reference to
this phenomenon, which dominated the first thirty years of the film
as art — that marvelous accord between a new technique and an
unprecedented message. This phenomenon has taken on a great
variety of forms: the star, reevaluation, the rebirth of the epic, of
the Commedia dell" Arte, and so on. But it was directly attributable
to technical progress — it was the novelty of expression which paid
the price for new themes. For thirty years the history of cin-
ematographic technique, in a broad sense, was bound up in practice
with the development of the scenario. The great directors are first
of all creators of form; if you wish, they are rhetoricians. This in no
sense means that they supported the theory of "art for art's sake,"

73

What Is Cinema?

but simply that in the dialectic of form and content, form was then the
determining factor in the same way that perspective or oils turned
the pictorial world upside down.

We have only to go back 10 or 15 years to observe evidence of
the aging of what was the patrimony of the art of cinema. We have
noted the speedy death of certain types of film, even major ones
like the slapstick comedy, but the most characteristic disappearance
is undoubtedly that of the star. Certain actors have always been a
commercial success with the public, but this devotion has nothing
in common with the socioreligious phenomenon of which Rudolph
Valentino and Greta Garbo were the golden calves. It all seemed as
if the area of cinematic themes had exhausted whatever it could
have hoped for from technique. It was no longer enough to invent
quick cutting or a new style of photography, in order to stir peo-
ple's emotions. Unaware, the cinema had passed into the age of the
scenario. By this we mean a reversal of the relationship between
matter and form. Not that form has become a matter of indiffer-
ence, quite the opposite. It had never been more rigorously deter-
mined by the content or become more necessary or a matter of
greater subtlety. But all this knowledge that we have acquired oper-
ates against the intrusion of form, rendering it virtually invisible
before a subject that we appreciate today for its own sake and
concerning which we become more and more exacting. Like those
rivers which have finally hollowed out their beds and have only the
strength left to carry their waters to the sea, without adding one
single grain of sand to their banks, the cinema approaches its
equilibrium-profile. The days are gone when it was enough to
"make cinema" in order to deserve well of the seventh art. While
we wait until color or stereoscopy provisionally return its primacy
to form and create a new cycle of aesthetic erosion, on the surface
cinema has no longer anything to conquer. There remains for it
only to irrigate its banks, to insinuate itself between the arts among
which it has so swiftly carved out its valleys, subtly to invest them,
to infiltrate the subsoil, in order to excavate invisible galleries. The

74

In Defense of Mixed Cinema

time of resurgence of a cinema newly independent of novel and
theater will return. But it may then be because novels will be
written directly onto film. As it awaits the dialectic of the history of
art which will restore to it this desirable and hypothetical auton-
omy, the cinema draws into itself the formidable resources of elab-
orated subjects amassed around it by neighboring arts during the
course of the centuries. It will make them its own because it has
need of them and we experience the desire to rediscover them by
way of the cinema.

This being done, cinema will not be a substitute for them, rather
will the opposite be true. The success of filmed theater helps the
theater just as the adaptation of the novel serves the purpose of
literature. Hamlet on the screen can only increase Shakespeare's
public and a part of this public at least will have the taste to go and
hear it on the stage. Le Journal d'un cure de campagne, as seen by
Robert Bresson, increased Bernanos' readers tenfold. The truth is
there is here no competition or substitution, rather the adding of a
new dimension that the arts had gradually lost from the time of
the Reformation on: namely a public.

Who will complain of that?

75

THEATER AND CINEMA

Part One

while critics often draw attention to the resemblances between
the cinema and the novel, "filmed theater" still frequently passes for
heresy. So long as its advocates and its prime examples were the
statements and the plays of Marcel Pagnol it was reasonable
enough to explain his one or two successes as flukes resulting from
an unusual combination of circumstances. "Filmed theater" was
bound up with recollections, in retrospect so farcical, of the film
d'art or the boulevard hits in the "style" of Berthomieu. (Note;
Unique, an incomprehensible exception at the threshold of the
talking film, stands the unforgettable Jean de la lime.) The wartime
failure of the screen adaptation of that admirable play he Voyageur
sans baggages, the subject of which would seem to have been suit-
ably cinematic, apparently clinched the matter for the opponents of
"filmed theater." It took a run of recent successes, from The Little
Foxes to Macbeth by way of Henry V, Hamlet, and Les Parents
terribles, to show that the cinema is a valid medium for a wide
variety of dramatic works.

Truthfully speaking, those prejudiced against filmed theater
would not have so many examples from the past to point to if the

76

Theater and Cinema — Part One

question were confined to films that were avowedly adaptations of
plays. There is then some justification for looking over the history of
films not according to titles but on the basis of their dramatic
structure and direction.

A Brief Historical Note

While the critics were busy damning filmed theater without re-
course, they were at the same time showering praise on certain
forms of cinema that a closer analysis would have revealed to be
the very embodiment of the art of the drama. Their vision obscured
by the film d'art and its offspring, the customs were letting by,
stamped as "pure cinema," various examples of cinematographic
theater beginning with American comedy. If you look at this com-
edy closely you will see that it is no less "theatrical" than the adap-
tation of any boulevard or Broadway play. Built on comedy of
dialogue and situation, most of the scenes are interiors while the
editing uses the device of shot-and-reverse-shot to point up the
dialogue. Here one should perhaps expound on the sociological
background that made possible the brilliant development of the
American comedy over a decade. The effect of this I believe would
be to confirm the existence of a working relationship between the-
ater and cinema. The cinema had, so to speak, dispensed theater
from any need for prior existence. There was no such need since the
authors of these plays could sell them direcdy to the screen. But
this is a purely accidental phenomenon historically related to a
combination of sociological and economic conditions now seem-
ingly on their way out. For the past fifteen years we have seen,
along with the decline of a certain type of American comedy, an
increasing number of filmed Broadway comedy successes.

In the realm of psychological drama and the drama of manners,
Wyler had no hesitation in taking the play by Lillian Hellman, The

11

What Is Cinema?
Little Foxes, lock, stock and barrel, and bringing it to the screen
virtually in its theatrical entirety. Actually there has never been any
prejudice against filmed theater in the United States. But the cir-
cumstances of production in Hollywood, at least up to 1940, were
not the same as in Europe. It was a matter there of a cinemato-
graphic theater restricted to certain specific genres and at least
during the first decade of sound, of borrowing little from the stage.
The present crisis in screen material in Hollywood has sent it look-
ing for help more frequently to written theater. But in American
comedy the theater, albeit invisible, was always potentially there.*

There is no question that we in Europe can lay no claim to an
achievement comparable to the American comedy. With the excep-
tion of the special case of Marcel Pagnol, which needs a special
study, boulevard comedies have failed lamentably on the screen.

Filmed theater, however, does not begin with sound. Let us go a
little farther back, specifically to the time when the film d'art was
demonstrably failing. That was the heyday of Melies who saw the
cinema as basically nothing more than a refinement of the marvels
of the theater. Special effects were for him simply a further evolu-
tion of conjuring. The greater part of French and American come-
dians come from the music hall or from the boulevard theater. One
need only look at Max Linder to see how much he owes to his
theatrical experience. Like most comics of his time he plays directly

* In his book of reminiscences covering 50 years of cinema, entitled The
Public Is Always Right, Adolph Zukor, creator of the star system, also fells us
how tie cinema in America even more than in France used its nascent aware-
ness to plunder the theater. Realizing that the commercial future of the cinema
depended on the quality of the subject matter and the prestige of the cast, Zukor
bought up as many film adaptation rights as he could and enticed big names
away from the theater. His salary scales, relatively high for the time, did not
however always overcome the reluctance of the actors to become a part of this
despised industry with its fairground flavor. Very soon, after the break with
the theater, the phenomenon of the "star" peculiar to the cinema emerged, the
public chose its favorites from among the famous theater names, and this
elect rapidly acquired a glory with which stage fame could not be compared.
Similarly, the earlier theatrical scenarios were abandoned in favor of stories
adapted to the new mythology. Still, it was by copying the theater that the
start had been made.

78

Theater and Cinema — Part One

the audience, winks at them and calls on them to witness his
embarrassment, and does not shrink from asides. As for Charlie
Chaplin, apart from his indebtedness to the English school of
mime, it is clear that his art consists in perfecting, thanks to the
cinema, his skill as a music-hall comic. Here the cinema offers more
than the theater but only by going beyond it, by relieving it of its
imperfections. The economics of the gag are governed by the dis-
tance between the stage and the audience and above all by the
length of the laughs which spur the actor to protract his effect to
the point of their extinction. The stage, then, eggs him on, forces him
indeed to exaggerate. Only the screen could allow Charlie to attain
mathematical perfection of situation and gesture whereby the maxi-
mum effect is obtained in the minimum of time.

When one sees again the really old slapstick films, the Boireau
or Onesime series, for example, it is not only the acting which
strikes one as belonging to the theater, it is also the structure of the
story. The cinema makes it possible to carry a simple situation to its
ultimate conclusions which on the stage would be restricted by time
and space, that is, to what might be called a larval stage. What
makes it possible to believe that the cinema exists to discover or
create a new set of dramatic facts is its capacity to transform the-
atrical situations that otherwise would never have reached their
maturity. In Mexico there is a kind of salamander capable of repro-
duction at the larval stage and which develops no further. By inject-
ing it with hormones, scientists have brought it to maturity. In like
fashion we know that the continuity of animal evolution presented
us with incomprehensible gaps until biologists discovered the laws
of paidomorphosis from which they learnt not only to place em-
bryonic forms in the line of evolution of the species but also to
recognize that certain individuals, seemingly adult, have been
halted in their evolutionary development. In this sense certain types
of theater are founded on dramatic situations that were con-
genitally atrophied prior to the appearance of the cinema. If theater
is, as Jean Hytier says it is, a metaphysic of the will, what is one to

79

What Is Cinema?
think of a burlesque like One si me et le beau voyage — where an
obstinate determination to proceed in spite of the most ludicrous
obstacles, with a not too clearly explained sort of honeymoon trip
which ceases to make any sense after certain early mishaps, borders
on a kind of metaphysical insanity, a delirium of the will, a cancer-
ous regeneration of action from out of itself against all reason.

Has one even the right here to use the terminology of the psy-
chologist and speak of will? The majority of these burlesques are an
endlessly protracted expression of something that cries from within
the character. They are a kind of phenomenology of obstinacy. The
domestic Boireau will continue to do the housework till the house
collapses in ruins. Onesime, the migratory spouse, will continue on
his honeymoon trip to the point of embarking for the horizon in his
wicker trunk. The action here no longer calls for plot, episodes,
repercussions, misunderstandings, or sudden reversals. It unfolds
implacably to the point at which it destroys itself. It proceeds un-
swervingly towards a kind of rudimentary catharsis of catastrophe
like a small child recklessly inflating a rubber balloon to the point
where it explodes in his face — to our relief and possibly to his.

For the rest, when one examines the history of the characters,
situations, and routines of classical farce it is impossible to avoid
the conclusion that slapstick cinema gave it a sudden and dazzling
rebirth. The "flesh and blood farce," on its way out since the seven-
teenth century, survived, highly specialized and transformed, only
in the circus and in certain kinds of music hall. That is to say
precisely in these places where the Hollywood producers of slap-
stick films went for their actors. The routines of this genre com-
bined with the resources of the cinema added widely to their tech-
nical repertory. It made possible a Max Under, a Buster Keaton, a
Laurel and Hardy, a Chaplin. Between 1903 and 1920 it reached a
peak unique in its history. I am referring to the tradition of farce as
it has been perpetuated since the days of Plautus and Terence and
even including the Commedia dell'Arte with its special themes and
techniques. Let me take just one example. The "vat routine" turns

80

Theater and Cinema — Part One

p spontaneously in an old Max Linder around 1912 or 1913 in
w hich we see the sprightly Don Juan seducer of the dyer's wife
forced to take a header into a vat full of dye to escape the vengeance
of the cheated husband. In a case like this there is no question of
imitation, or of influence or of a remembered routine, just the spon-
taneous linking up of a genre with its tradition.

he Text! The Text!

It is clear from these few recollections from the past that the relations
between theater and cinema are much older and closer than is gen-
erally thought to be the case and that they are certainly not limited
to what is generally and deprccatingly called "filmed theater." We
have also seen that the influence, as unconscious as it was unavowed,
of the repertory and traditions of theater has been very marked on
that class of film considered purely and specifically cinematic.

But the problem of the adaptation of a play as we generally use
the term is something different again. We must begin, before going
any further, by distinguishing between theatrical reality and dra-
matic reality.

Drama is the soul of the theater but this soul sometimes inhabits
other bodies. A sonnet, a fable of La Fontaine, a novel, a film can
owe their effectiveness to what Henri Gouhier calls "the dramatic
categories." From this point of view it is useless to claim autonomy
for the theater. Either that, or we must show it to be something
negative. That is to say a play cannot not be dramatic while a novel
is free to be dramatic or not. Of Mice and Men is simultaneously a
novel and a model tragedy. On the other hand, it would be very
hard to adapt Swann's Way for the theater. One would not praise a
play for its novel-like qualities yet one may very well congratulate a
novelist for being able to structure an action.

Nevertheless, if we insist that the dramatic is exclusive to the-

81

What Is Cinema?
ater, we must concede its immense influence and also that the
cinema is the least likely of the arts to escape this influence. At this
rate, half of literature and three quarters of the existing films are
branches of theater. It is equally true that this is not the way to
state the problem. The problem only came alive by virtue of the
incarnation of the theatrical work not in the actor but in the text.

Phedre was written to be played but it also exists as a work and
as a tragedy for the student as he labors the year round at his
classics. "Armchair theater," having only imagination to rely on, is
lacking as theater, but it is nevertheless still theater. On the con-
trary Cyrano de Bergerac or Le Voyageur sans baggages as filmed
are not, in spite of the text and of a generous dose of spectacle into
the bargain.

If it were permissible to take just one single action from Phe'dre,
to reconstruct it according to the requirements of the novel or of
cinematic dialogue, we would find ourselves back with our earlier
hypothesis, namely of the theatrical reduced to the dramatic. Now
while, metaphysically speaking, there is nothing to prevent one
from doing this, there are a number of historical and purely prac-
tical arguments against it. The simplest of them is a salutary fear of
the ridiculous, while the most forceful is our modern attitude to-
wards a work of art which demands respect for the text and for the
rights of authorship, and which is morally binding even after the
author's death. In other words, only Racine has the right to make
an adaptation of Phedre. But here, over and above the fact that
even so there is no guarantee that it would be any good (Anouilh
himself adapted Le Voyageur sans baggages) there is also another
fact to consider. Racine happens to be dead.

Some will hold that the situation is not the same during an
author's lifetime, since he can himself revise his work and remodel
his material. Andre Gide did this recently although in an opposite
direction, namely from novel to screen with Les Caves du Vatican.
At least he can keep an eye on the result and guarantee the adapta-
tion. A closer examination however shows that this is a matter

82

Theater and Cinema — Part One

father of jurisdiction than of aesthetics. In the first place talent, and
gt ill less genius, are not to be found everywhere, and nothing can
guarantee that the original and the adaptation will be of the same
standard even if they are the work of the same author. Further-
more, the usual reason for wanting to make a film out of a contem-
porary play is its commercial success in the theater. In the course of
its successful run, the text, as tried out, has become crystallized so
to speak as to its essentials and it is this text that the film audience
will be looking for. So here we are, by way of a more or less
honorable detour, back at our respect for the written text.

Finally it may be argued that the greater the dramatic quality of
a work the more difficult it is to separate off the dramatic from the
theatrical element, a synthesis of the two having been achieved in
the text. It is significant that while novels are often dramatized, a
novel is rarely made from a play. It is as if the theater stood at the
end of an irreversible process of aesthetic refinement.

Strictly speaking one could make a play out of Madame Bovary
or The Brothers Karamazov. But had the plays come first it would
be impossible to derive from them the novels as we know them. In
other words, when the drama is so much a part of the novel that it
cannot be taken from it, reciprocally the novel can only be the
result of a process of induction which in the arts means purely and
simply a new creation. Compared with the play, the novel is only
one of the many possible syntheses derivable from the simple dra-
matic element.

I am comparing for the moment novel and theater but there is
every reason to suppose that the argument applies with greater
force to the cinema. For we have one of two things to choose from.
The film is either the photographed play, text and all, in which case
we have our famous "filmed theater." Or the play is adapted to the
requirements of the cinema and we are back with the composite
that we spoke of above and it is a question of a new work. Jean
Renoir drew his inspiration for Boudu sauve des eaux from the play

Rene Fauchois but he made a superior thing of it, which in all

83

What Is Cinema?
probability eclipsed the original.* This is, incidentally, an exception
that definitely proves the rule.

However one approaches it, a play whether classic or modern ig
unassailably protected by its text. There is no way of adapting the
text without disposing of it and substituting something else, which
may be better but is not the play. This is a practice, for that matter,
restricted of necessity to second-class authors or to those still living,
since the masterpieces that time has hallowed demand, as a postu-
late, that we respect their texts.

The experience of the last ten years bears this out. If the prob-
lem of filmed theater has taken on a new lease of aesthetic life it is
thanks to films like Hamlet, Henry V, and Macbeth among the
classics, and among contemporary works films like The Little Foxes
by Lillian Hellman and Wyler, Les Parents terribles, Occupe-toi
d'Amelie, Rope. Jean Cocteau had written an adaptation of Les
Parents terribles prior to the war. When he took up the project
again in 1946 he decided to go back to the original text As we shall
see, a little later he also virtually preserved the original stage set-
tings. Whether it has been in the United States, England, or
France, both with the classics and the contemporary plays, the
evolution of filmed theater has been the same. It has been charac-
terized by an increasingly exacting demand for fidelity to the text as
originally written. It is as if all the various experiments of the sound
film had converged on this point.

Previously the first concern of a film-maker was to disguise the
theatrical origins of his model, to adapt it and to dissolve it in
cinema. Not only does he seem to have abandoned this attitude, he
makes a point of emphasizing its theatrical character. It could not
be otherwise from the moment we preserve the essentials of the
text. Conceived with a view to the potentialities of the theater,
these are already embodied in the text. The text determines the
mode and style of the production; it is already potentially the the-

* He took no less a liberty with La Carosse du S. Sacrement by Merim^e.

84

Theater and Cinema — Part One

ater. There is no way at one and the same time of being faithful to
it and of turning it aside from the direction it was supposed to
go-

Hide That Theater Which I Cannot Abide!

We shall find a confirmation of this in an example borrowed from
classical theater. It is a film that may still, perhaps, be creating
havoc in French schools and lycees and which pretends to offer a
method of teaching literature through cinema. I refer to he Mede-
cin malgre lui. It was brought to the screen, with the help of a
doubtlessly well-intentioned teacher, by a director whose name we
will not disclose. This film has a dossier, as laudatory as it is de-
pressing, from professors and headmasters of lycees who are de-
lighted by its fine qualities. In reality it is an unbelievable collection
of all the faults guaranteed to make an end of film and theater
alike, to say nothing of Moliere himself. The first scene, with the
bundles of wood, set in a real forest, opens with an interminable
travelling shot through the underbrush, destined obviously to allow
us to enjoy the effects of sunlight on the underside of the branches
before showing us two clownlike characters who are presumably
gathering mushrooms and whose stage costumes, in this setting,
look like nothing so much as grotesque disguises. Real settings are
used as much as possible throughout the film. The arrival of
Sganarelle for a consultation is seized upon as an opportunity to
show us a small country manor house of the seventeenth century.
And what of the editing? In the first scene it moves from medium
full-shot to full-shot, cross cutting with each piece of dialogue. One
has the feeling that if the text, much against the director's will, had
not dictated the length of film, he would have presented the flow of
dialogue in that speeded-up form of editing we associate with Abel
Gance. Such as it is, the editing sees to it that the students, through
the use of shot-and-reverse-shot in close-up, miss nothing of the

85

What Is Cinema?

miming of the cast from the Comedie Franchise, which unquestion-
ably takes us back to the heyday of the film d'art.

It by cinema we understand liberty of action in regard to space,
and freedom to choose your angle of approach to the action, then
filming a play should give the setting a breadth and reality un-
attainable on the stage. It would also free the spectator from his
seat and by varying the shots give an added quality to the acting.

Faced with productions of this kind, one must agree that every
argument against filmed theater is a valid one. But the problem is
not with the production at all. What was actually done was to inject
the power of "cinema" into the theater. The original drama and the
text even more so have been turned out of house and home, so to
speak. The duration of the action on the stage and on screen are
obviously not the same. The dramatic primacy of the word is
thrown off center by the additional dramatization that the camera
gives to the setting. Finally and above all, a certain artificiality, an
exaggerated transformation of the decor, is totally incompatible
with that realism which is of the essence of the cinema. The text of
Moliere only takes on meaning in a forest of painted canvas and the
same is true of the acting. The footlights are not the autumn sun. If
it comes to that, the scene of the bundles of wood could be played
in front of a curtain. It no longer calls for the foot of a tree.

This failure is a good example of what may be considered the
major heresy of filmed theater, namely the urge "to make cinema."
By and large this is responsible for the majority of adaptations of
successful plays. If the action is supposed to take place on the Cote
d'Azur, the lovers, instead of chatting in a nook of a bar, will be
kissing at the wheel of an American car as they drive along the
Corniche against a back projection showing the rocks of the Cap
d'Antibes. As for editing, the contracts of Raimu and Fernandel
being the same will assure us of a reasonably equal number of close-
ups favoring now one and now the other.

Besides, the preconceptions of the public in these matters serve
to confirm those of the film-makers. People in general do not give

86

Theater and Cinema — Part One

much thought to the cinema. For them it means vast decor, ex-
teriors, and plenty of action. If they are not given at least a mini-
mum of what they call cinema, they feel cheated. The cinema must
be more lavish than the theater. Every actor must be a somebody
and any hint of poverty or meanness in the everyday surrounding
contributes, so they say, to a flop. Obviously then, a director or a
producer who is willing to challenge the public prejudice in these
matters needs courage. Especially if they do not have too much
faith in what they are doing. The heresy of filmed theater is rooted
in an ambivalent complex that cinema has about the theater. It is
an inferiority complex in the presence of an older and more literary
art, for which the cinema proceeds to overcompensate by the "su-
periority 1 ' of its technique — which in turn is mistaken for an aes-
thetic superiority.

Canned or Supertheater?

Would you like to see these errors disproved? Two successful films
like Henry V and Les Parents terribles will do the job perfectly.

When the director of he Me dec in malgre lui opened on a
travelling shot in the forest, it was with the naive and perhaps
unconscious hope that it would help us swallow the unfortunate
scene with the bundles of wood like a sugar-coated pill. He tried to
give us a litde environment of reality, to give us a ladder onto the
stage. His awkward tricks had, unfortunately, the opposite effect.
They underlined the unreality of both the characters and the text.

Now let us see how Laurence Olivier succeeded in resolving the
dialectic between cinematic realism and theatrical convention. His
film also begins with a travelling shot, but in this case its purpose is
to plunge us into the theater, the courtyard of an Elizabethan inn.
He is not pretending to make us forget the conventions of the
theater. On the contrary he affirms them. It is not with the play

87

What Is Cinema?

Henry V that the film is immediately and directly concerned, but
with a performance of Henry V. This we know from the fact that
the performance here given is not supposed to be an actual one, as
when the play is given in the theater. It is supposed to be taking
place in Shakespeare's day and we are even shown the audience
and the backstage areas. There is no mistake about it, the act of
faith usually required of a spectator as the curtain rises is not
needed here for the enjoyment of the spectacle. We are not in the
play, we are in an historical film about the Elizabethan theater, that
is to say, we are present at a film of a kind that is widely accepted
and to which we are quite used. Our enjoyment of the play how-
ever is not of the kind we would get from an historical documen-
tary. It is in fact the pleasure to be derived from a Shakespearean
performance. In other words the aesthetic strategy of Laurence
Olivier was a trick to escape from the "miracle of the curtain," that
is, from the need for the usual suspension of disbelief.

In making his film out of a play by showing us, from the open-
ing, by a cinematic device that we are concerned here with theatri-
cal style and conventions instead of trying to hide them, he relieved
realism of that which makes it the foe of theatrical illusion. Once
assured of a psychological hold on the complicity of the spectator,
Olivier could then perfectly well allow himself the switch in pic-
torial style to the battle of Agincourt. Shakespeare invited it by his
deliberate appeal to the imagination of the spectator; here again
Olivier had a perfect excuse. This recourse to the cinematic,
difficult to justify if the film was just a reproduction of
the play, finds its justification in the play itself. Naturally he still
had to honor his promise and we know that he did this. Let us
simply remark here that the color, which may eventually come to
seem an essentially unrealistic element, helps to justify the transi-
tion to the realm of the imaginary and once there to make it possi-
ble to accept a continuity which passes from miniatures to a realis-
tic reconstruction of the batde of Agincourt. Never for one moment
is Henry V really "filmed theater." The film exists so to speak side

88

Theater and Cinema — Part One

side with the theatrical presentation, in front of and behind the
stage. Both Shakespeare and the theater however are truly its pris-
oners, hemmed in on all sides by cinema.

The boulevard theater of today does not appear to make quite
such obvious use of the conventions of theater. The "Theatre
Libre" and the theories of Antoine might even lead one to believe
in the existence at one time of a "realist" theater, a kind of pre-
cinema.* This is an illusion that no longer fools anybody. If there is
such a thing, it is again only something that relates to a system of
less obvious conventions, less explicit but just as absolute. There is
no such thing as a "slice of life" in the theater. In any case, the mere
fact that it is exposed to view on the stage removes it from every-
day existence and turns it into something seen as it were in a shop
window. It is in a measure part of the natural order but it is pro-
foundly modified by the conditions under which we observe it.

Antoine might decorate the stage with real joints of meat but,
unlike the cinema, he could not show a whole flock of sheep passing
by. If he wanted to plant a tree on the stage he had first to uproot it
and in any case he had to give up any idea of showing the entire

* A comment here might not come amiss. We must first of all recognize
that melodrama and drama stirred up a realist revolution at the very core of
the theater: the ideal stendhalian spectator fires a revolver at the traitor in
the play (Orson Welles was later to do the opposite on Broadway and turn
a machinegun on the orchestra stalls). A hundred years later, Antoine will
stage a realist text by way of realist mise-en-scene. If Antoine subsequently
made films it was not just a coincidence. The fact is that if one goes back a
little into history, one must agree that an elaborate attempt at "theater-cinema"
had already preceded "cinema-theater.'* Dumas fits and Antoine were the pre-
cursors of Marcel Pagnol. It could very well be that the renaissance in theater
spurred by Antoine was greatly aided by the existence of cinema, which had
taken upon its own head the heresy of realism and limited the theories of
Antoine to a reasonable and effective reaction against symbolism. The choice
that the Vieux Colombier had made during the revolution of the Theatre Libre
Cleaving realism to the Grand Guignol), reasserting the value of stage con-
ventions, might not have been possible without the competition of the cinema.
^ was a perfect example of competition which, whatever happens, has finally
laughed dramatic realism out of court. Nobody can pretend today that even
the most bourgeois of boulevard dramas is without its full share of theatrical
conventions.

89

forest. So really his tree still derives from the Elizabethan placard
which in the end is only a signpost. If we bear these undoubted
truths in mind we will then admit that the filming of a melodrama
like Les Parents terribles presents problems very little different
from filming a classic play. What we here call realism does not at all
place the play on the same footing as the cinema. It does not do
away with the footlights. To put it simply, the system of conven-
tions that govern the production and hence the text are, so to speak,
at the initial level. The conventions of tragedy with their procession
of odd-looking properties and their alexandrines are but masks and
cothurni that confirm and emphasize the basic convention which ig
theater.

Cocteau was well aware of this when he filmed his Parents
terribles. Again, since his play was markedly realist, Cocteau the
film-maker understood that he must add nothing to the setting, that
the role of the cinema was not to multiply but to intensify ... if
the room of the play became an apartment in the film, thanks to the
screen and to the camera it would feel even more cramped than the
room on the stage. What it was essential to bring out was a sense of
people being shut in and living in close proximity. A single ray of
sunlight, any other than electric light, would have destroyed that
delicately balanced and inescapable coexistence. The crowded
coach too may travel to the other end of Paris, to Madeleine's
house. We leave it at the door of one apartment to discover it at the
door of the other. We do not have here the example of the classical
editing short-cut but a positive part of the direction, which the
cinema did not impose on Cocteau and who thereby went beyond
the expressive possibilities of the theater. The latter, being re-
stricted, cannot therefore produce the same effect. A hundred ex-
amples could be adduced to confirm the respect of the camera for
the stage setting, its concern being only to increase the effectiveness
of the settings and never to attempt to interfere with their relation
to the characters of the play. All the annoyances of theater are not
so easily disposed of. Having to show each room in succession and

90

Theater and Cinema — Fart One

meanwhile to lower the curtain is without doubt a pointless imposi-
tion. Thanks to its mobility, it is the camera that is responsible for
the real unity of time and place. The theater needed the cinema
before it could freely express what it had to say and Les Parents
(crribles could be shown to be a tragedy of an apartment in which a
door left ajar could take on more significance than a monologue on
a bed. Cocteau never lets his work down, his respect for what are
the essential requirements being the greater in proportion as he is
able to separate them from those happenings which are not essen-
tial. The function of the cinema is to reveal, to bring to light certain
details that the stage would have left untreated.

The problem of the decor having been solved, the most difficult
one still remained, namely the editing. Here Cocteau gave proof of
his ingenious imagination. The notion of "shot" is finally disposed
of. There remains henceforth only the question of framing the fleet-
ing crystallization of a reality of whose environing presence one is
ceaselessly aware. Cocteau likes to tell how he thought his film
through in 16mm. "Thought it through" is right. He would have
been hard put to direct it in anything less than 35 mm. What is
important here is for the spectator to have a feeling of being totally
present at what is going on, not as in Welles 1 pictures (or in Re-
noir's) through depth of focus but by virtue of a diabolic speed of
vision which seems for the first time to be wedded here to the pure
rhythm of attention. Undoubtedly all good editing takes this into
consideration. The traditional device of shot-re verse-shot divides up
the dialogue according to an elementary syntax of interest. The
close-up of a telephone that rings at a pathetic moment is the
equivalent of a concentration of attention. It seems to us however
that normal editing is a compromise between three ways of possibly
analyzing reality.

(1) A purely logical and descriptive analysis (the weapon used
in the crime lying beside the corpse). (2) A psychological analysis
from within the film, namely one that fits the point of view of one
°f the protagonists in a given situation. An example of this would

91

What Is Cinema?

be the glass of milk that may possibly be poisoned which Ingrifl
Bergman has to drink in Notorious, or the ring on the finger of
Theresa Wright in The Shadow of a Doubt. (3) Finally, a psycho*
logical analysis from the point of view of spectator interest, either a
spontaneous interest or one provoked by the director thanks pre-
cisely to this analysis. An example of this would be the handle of a
door turning unseen by the criminal who thinks he is alone. ("Look
out," the children used to shout to the Guignol whom the policeman
is about to surprise.)

These three points of view which combined together constitute
the synthesis of cinematographic events in most films are felt to be
unique. Actually they imply at once a psychological heterogeneity
and a material discontinuity. They are basically the same as those
peddled by the traditional novelist — which, as we know, brought
down the wrath of J.-P. Sartre on the head of Francois Mauriac.
The importance of depth of focus and the fixed camera in the films
of Orson Welles and William Wyler springs from a reluctance to
fragment things arbitrarily and a desire instead to show an image
that is uniformly understandable and that compels the spectator to
make his own choice.

Although he remains faithful to the classic pattern of cutting —
his film includes a fair number of shots above medium — Cocteau
gives it a special significance by using, practically exclusively, shots
from category number three above. Logical and descriptive analysis
together with points of view of the actor are virtually eliminated.
There remain those of the witness. The subjective camera finally
becomes a reality but in an opposite sense, that is to say not as in
The Lady in the Lake, thanks to a puerile kind of identification of
the spectator and the character by means of a camera trick but, on
the contrary, through the pitiless gaze of an invisible witness. The
camera is at last a spectator and nothing elfce. The drama is once
more a spectacle. It was indeed Cocteau who said that cinema is an
event seen through a keyhole. The impression we get here from the
keyhole is of an invasion of privacy, the quasi-obscenity of "view-

92

Theater and Cinema — Part One

ing." Let us take a highly significant example of this position of
••exteriority." It is one of the final shots of the picture when Yvonne
de Bray, poisoned, is withdrawing backwards into her own room,
her eyes on the busy group around the happy Madeleine. The
camera pulls back to accompany her. But the movement of the
camera, no matter how great the temptation, is never confused with
the subjective viewpoint of "Sophie." The shock of the travelling
shot would be certainly more violent if we were in the position of
the actress and were looking with her eyes. But Cocteau carefully
avoided this false move. He keeps Yvonne de Bray "as bait" and
pulls back, retreating a little, behind her. The purpose of the shot is
to show not that she is looking, not even her gaze, it is to see her
actually looking. It is done doubdess over her shoulder as is the
privilege of cinema — one which Cocteau hastens to restore to the
theater.

He thus returned to the principle of audience-stage relations.
While the cinema allowed him to seize upon the drama from many
angles, he deliberately chose to adopt the viewpoint of the spectator,
the one denominator common to stage and screen.

So Cocteau maintains the essentially theatrical character of his
play. Instead of trying like so many others to dissolve it in cinema,
on the contrary he uses the resources of the camera to point up, to
underline, to confirm the structure of the scenes and their psycho-
logical corollaries. The specific help given here by the cinema can
only be described as an added measure of the theatrical.

As a result he joins ranks with Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles,
Wyler, and Dudley Nichols. This is borne out by an analysis of
Macbeth, Hamlet, The Little Foxes, and Mourning Becomes Elec-
tro, to say nothing of a film like Occupe-toi d'Amelie where Claude
Autant-Lara does with vaudeville something comparable to what
Olivier does with Henry V. All these very characteristic successes of
the past fifteen years illustrate a paradox. One is no longer adapting
a subject. One is staging a play by means of cinema. The problem

93

of "canned" theater, whether it is a naive or an impudent question,
has certainly taken on a new lease of life as a result of these recent
successes. We have tried to see how it happened. Now, more ambi-
tious than ever, wiE we be able to find out why?

94

THEATER AND CINEMA
Part Two

the leitmotiv of those who despise filmed theater, their final and
apparently insuperable argument, continues to be the unparalleled
pleasure that accompanies the presence of the actor. "What is spe-
cific to theater," writes Henri Gouhier, in The Essence of Theater,
"is the impossibility of separating off action and actor." Elsewhere
he says "the stage welcomes every illusion except that of presence;
the actor is there in disguise, with the soul and voice of another, but
he is nevertheless there and by the same token space calls out for
him and for the solidity of his presence. On the other hand and
inversely, the cinema accommodates every form of reality save one
— the physical presence of the actor." If it is here that the essence of
theater lies then undoubtedly the cinema can in no way pretend to
any parallel with it. If the writing, the style, and the dramatic
structure are, as they should be, rigorously conceived as the re-
ceptacle for the soul and being of the flesh-and-blood actor, any
attempt to substitute the shadow and reflection of a man on the
screen for the man himself is a completely vain enterprise. There is
no answer to this argument. The successes of Laurence Olivier, of
Welles, or of Cocteau can only be challenged — here you need to be

95

in bad faith — or considered inexplicable. They are a challenge both
to critics and philosophers. Alternatively one can only explain them
by casting doubts on that commonplace of theatrical criticism "the
irreplacable presence of the actor."

The Concept of Presence

At this point certain comments seem called for concerning the con-
cept of "presence," since it would appear that it is this concept, as
understood prior to the appearance of photography, that the
cinema challenges.

Can the photographic image, especially the cinematographic
image, be likened to other images and in common with them be
regarded as having an existence distinct from the object? Presence,
naturally, is defined in terms of time and space. "To be in the
presence of someone" is to recognize him as existing contem-
poraneously with us and to note that he comes within the actual
range of our senses — in the case of cinema of our sight and in radio
of our hearing. Before the arrival of photography and later of
cinema, the plastic arts (especially portraiture) were the only inter-
mediaries between actual physical presence and absence. Their
justification was their resemblance which stirs the imagination and
helps the memory. But photography is something else again. In no
sense is it the image of an object or person, more correctly it is its
tracing. Its automatic genesis distinguishes it radically from the
other techniques of reproduction. The photograph proceeds by
means of the lens to the taking of a veritable luminous impression
in light — to a mold. As such it carries with it more than mere
resemblance, namely a kind of identity — the card we call by that
name being only conceivable in an age of photography. But pho-
tography is a feeble technique in the sense that its instantaneity
compels it to capture time only piecemeal. The cinema does some-

96

Theater and Cinema — Part Two

thing strangely paradoxical. It makes a molding of the object as it
exists in time and, furthermore, makes an imprint of the duration of
the object.

The nineteenth century with its objective techniques of visual
and sound reproduction gave birth to a new category of images, the
relation of which to the reality from which they proceed requires
very strict definition. Even apart from the fact that the resulting
aesthetic problems cannot be satisfactorily raised without this intro-
ductory philosophical inquiry, it would not be sound to treat the
old aesthetic questions as if the categories with which they deal had
in no way been modified by the appearance of completely new
phenomena. Common sense-perhaps the best philosophical guide
in this case — has clearly understood this and has invented an ex-
pression for the presence of an actor, by adding to the placards
announcing his appearance the phrase "in flesh and blood." This
means that for the man in the street the word "presence," today,
can be ambiguous, and thus an apparent redundancy is not out of
place in this age of cinema. Hence it is no longer as certain as it was
that there is no middle stage between presence and absence. It is
likewise at the ontological level that the effectiveness of the cinema
has its source. It is false to say that the screen is incapable of
putting us "in the presence of" the actor. It does so in the same way
as a mirror— one must agree that the mirror relays the presence of
the person reflected in it — but it is a mirror with a delayed reflec-
tion, the tin foil of which retains the image.* It is true that in the

* Television naturally adds a new variant to the "pseudopresenees" result-
ing from the scientific techniques for reproduction created by photography.
On the little screen during live television the actor is actually present in
space and time. But the reciprocal actor-spectator relationship is incomplete
in one direction. The spectator sees without being seen. There is no return
flow. Televised theater, therefore, seems to share something both of theater
and of cinema: of theater because the actor is present to the viewer, of cinema
because the spectator is not present to the actor. Nevertheless, this state of not
being present is not truly an absence. The television actor has a sense of the
millions of ears and eyes virtually present and represented by the electronic
camera. This abstract presence is most noticeable when the actor fluffs his

97

I

What Is Cinema?

theater Moliere can die on the stage and that we have the privilege
of living in the biographical time of the actor. In the film about
Manolete however we are present at the actual death of the famous
matador and while our emotion may not be as deep as if we were
actually present in the arena at that historic moment, its nature is
the same. What we lose by way of direct witness do we not recap-
ture thanks to the artificial proximity provided by photographic
enlargement? Everything takes place as if in the time-space perime-
ter which is the definition of presence. The cinema offers us effec-
tively only a measure of duration, reduced but not to zero, while
the increase in the space factor reestablishes the equilibrium of the
psychological equation.

An honest appraisal of the respective pleasures derived from the-
ater and cinema, at least as to what is less intellectual and more
direct about them, forces us to admit that the delight we experience
at the end of a play has a more uplifting, a nobler, one might
perhaps say a more moral, effect than the satisfaction which follows
a good film. We seem to come away with a better conscience. In a
certain sense it is as if for the man in the audience all theater is
"Corneillian." From this point of view one could say that in the best
films something is missing. It is as if a certain inevitable lowering of
the voltage, some mysterious aesthetic short circuit, deprived us in
the cinema of a certain tension which is a definite part of theater.
No matter how slight this difference it undoubtedly exists, even
between the worst charity production in the theater and the most
brilliant of Olivier's film adaptations. There is nothing banal about

lines. Painful enough in the theater, it is intolerable on television since the
spectator who can do nothing to help him is aware of the unnatural solitude
of the actor. In the theater in similar circumstances a sort of understanding
exists with the audience, which is a help to an actor in trouble. This kind of
reciprocal relationship is impossible on television.

Opposition and Identification

98

Theater and Cinema — Part Two

this observation and the survival of the theater after fifty years of
cinema, and the prophecies of Marcel Pagnol, is practical proof
enough. At the source of the disenchantment which follows the film
one could doubtless detect a process of depersonalization of the
spectator. As Rosenkrantz wrote in 1937, in Esprit, in an article
profoundly original for its period, "The characters on the screen are
quite naturally objects of identification, while those on the stage
are, rather, objects of mental opposition because their real presence
gives them an objective reality and to transpose them into beings in
an imaginary world the will of the spectator has to intervene ac-
tively, that is to say, to will to transform their physical reality into
an abstraction. This abstraction being the result of a process of the
intelligence that we can only ask of a person who is fully conscious."
A member of a film audience tends to identify himself with the
film's hero by a psychological process, the result of which is to turn
the audience into a "mass" and to render emotion uniform. Just as
in algebra if two numbers equal a third, then they are equal to one
another, so here we can say, if two individuals identify themselves
with a third, they identify themselves with one another. Let us
compare chorus girls on the stage and on the screen. On the screen
they satisfy an unconscious sexual desire and when the hero joins
them he satisfies the desire of the spectator in the proportion to
which the latter has identified himself with the hero. On the stage
the girls excite the onlooker as they would in real life. The result is
that there is no identification with the hero. He becomes instead an
object of jealousy and envy. In other words, Tarzan is only possible
on the screen. The cinema calms the spectator, the theater excites
him. Even when it appeals to the lowest instincts, the theater up to
a certain point stands in the way of the creation of a mass mental-
ity.* It stands in the way of any collective representation in the
psychological sense, since theater calls for an active individual con-
sciousness while the film requires only a passive adhesion.

* Crowd and solitude are not antinomies: the audience in a movie house
is made up of solitary individuals. Crowd should be taken here to mean the
opposite of an organic community freely assembled.

99

. These views shed a new light on the problem of the actor. They
transfer him from the ontological to the psychological level. It is to
the extent to which the cinema encourages identification with the
hero that it conflicts with the theater. Put this way the problem is
no longer basically insoluble, for it is a fact that the cinema has at
its disposal means which favor a passive position or on the other
hand, means which to a greater or lesser degree stimulate the con-
sciousness of the spectator. Inversely the theater can find ways of
lessening the psychological tension between spectator and actor.
Thus theater and cinema will no longer be separated off by an
unbridgeable aesthetic moat, they would simply tend to give rise to
two attitudes of mind over which the director maintains a wide
control.

Examined at close quarters, the pleasure derived from the the-
ater not only differs from that of the cinema but also from that of
the novel. The reader of a novel, physically alone like the man in
the dark movie house, identifies himself with the character.* That is
why after reading for a long while he also feels the same intoxica-
tion of an illusory intimacy with the hero. Incontestably, there is in
the pleasure derived from cinema and novel a self-satisfaction, a
concession to solitude, a sort of betrayal of action by a refusal of
social responsibility.

The analysis of this phenomenon might indeed be undertaken
from a psychoanalytic point of view. It is not significant that the
psychiatrists took the term catharsis from Aristotle? Modern
pedagogic research on psychodrama seems to have provided fruit-
ful insights into the cathartic process of theater. The ambiguity
existing in the child's mind between play and reality is used to get
him to free himself by way of improvised theater from the re-
pressions from which he suffers. This technique amounts to creating
a kind of vague theater in which the play is of a serious nature and
the actor is his own audience. The action that develops on these

* Cf. CI. E. Magny, L'Age du roman americain, ed. Du Seuil.

100

Theater and Cinema — Part Two

occasions is not one that is divided off by footlights, which are
undoubtedly the architectural symbol of the censor that separates
u s from the stage. We delegate Oedipus to act in our guise and
place him on the other side of a wall of fire — that fiery frontier
between fantasy and reality which gives rein to Dionysiac monsters
while protecting us from them.* These sacred beasts will not cross
this barrier of light beyond which they seem out of place and even
sacrilegious — witness the disturbing atmosphere of awe which sur-
rounds an actor still made up, like a phosphorescent light, when we
visit him in his dressing room. There is no point to the argument
that the theater did not always have footlights. These are only a
symbol and there were others before them from the cothurnus and
mask onwards. In the seventeenth century the fact that young
nobles sat up on the stage is no denial of the role of the footlights,
on the contrary, it confirms it, by way of a privileged violation so to
speak, just as when today Orson Welles scatters actors around the
auditorium to fire on the audience with revolvers. He does not do
away with the footlights, he just crosses them. The rules of the
game are also made to be broken. One expects some players to
cheat, f With regard to the objection based on presence and on that
alone, the theater and the cinema are not basically in conflict. What
is really in dispute are two psychological modalities of a per-

* Cf. P. A. Touchard, Dionysos, ed. Du Seuil.

t Here is a final example proving that presence does not constitute theater
except in so far as it is a matter of a performance. Everyone either at his own
or someone else's expense has known the embarrassment of being watched
without knowing it or in spite of knowing it. Lovers who kiss on public benches
offer a spectacle to the passerby, but they do not care. My concierge who has
a feeling for the mot juste says, when she sees them, that it is like being at the
movies. Each of us has sometimes found himself forced to his annoyance to do
something absurd before other people. On those occasions we experience a
sense of angry shame which is the very opposite of theatrical exhibitionism.
Someone who looks through a keyhole is not at the theater; Cocteau has
rightly demonstrated in Le sang d'un poete that he was already at the cinema.
And nevertheless there are such things as "shows," when the protagonists are
present to us in flesh and blood but one of the two parties is ignorant of the
fact or goes through with it reluctantly. This is not "play" in the theatrical
sense.

101

What Is Cinema?

fonnance. The theater is indeed based on the reciprocal awareness
of the presence of audience and actor, but only as related to a
performance. The theater acts on us by virtue of our participation
in a theatrical action across the footlights and as it were under the
protection of their censorship. The opposite is true in the cinema.
Alone, hidden in a dark room, we watch through half-open blinds a
spectacle that is unaware of our existence and which is part of the
universe. There is nothing to prevent us from identifying ourselves
in imagination with the moving world before us, which becomes
the world. It is no longer on the phenomenon of the actor as a
person physically present that we should concentrate our analysis,
but rather on the ensemble of conditions that constitute the theatri-
cal play and deprive the spectator of active participation. We shall
see that it is much less a question of actor and presence than of man
and his relation to the decor.

Behind the Decor

The human being is all-important in the theater. The drama on the
screen can exist without actors. A banging door, a leaf in the wind,
waves beating on the shore can heighten the dramatic effect. Some
film masterpieces use man only as an accessory, like an extra, or in
counterpoint to nature which is the true leading character. Even
when, as in Nanook and Man of Aran, the subject is man's struggle
with nature, it cannot be compared to a theatrical action. The
mainspring of the action is not in man but nature. As Jean-Paul
Sartre, I think it was, said, in the theater the drama proceeds from
the actor, in the cinema it goes from the decor to man. This reversal
of the dramatic flow is of decisive importance. It is bound up with
the very essence of the mise-en-scene. One must see here one of the

102

Theater and Cinema — Part Two

consequences of photographic realism. Obviously, if the cinema
makes use of nature it is because it is able to. The camera puts at
the disposal of the director all the resources of the telescope and the
microscope. The last strand of a rope about to snap or an entire
army making an assault on a hill are within our reach. Dramatic
causes and effects have no longer any material limits to the eye of
the camera. Drama is freed by the camera from all contingencies of
time and space. But this freeing of tangible dramatic powers is still
only a secondary aesthetic cause, and does not basically explain the
reversal of value between the actor and the decor. For sometimes it
actually happens that the cinema deliberately deprives itself of the
use of setting and of exterior natures have already seen a per-
fect instance of this in Les Parents terribles—wMt the theater in
contrast uses a complex machinery to give a feeling of ubiquity to
the audience. Is La Passion de Jeanne a" Arc by Carl Dreyer, shot
entirely in close-up, in the virtually invisible and in fact theatrical
settings by Jean Hugo, less cinematic than Stagecoach? It seems to
me that quantity has nothing to do with it, nor the resemblance to
certain theater techniques. The ideas of an art director for a room
in Les Dames aux camelias would not noticeably differ whether for
a film or a play. It's true that on the screen you would doubtless
have some close-ups of the blood-stained handkerchief, but a skill-
ful stage production would also know how to make some play with
the cough and the handkerchief. All the close-ups in Les Parents
terribles are taken directly from the theater where our attention
would spontaneously isolate them. If film direction only differed
from theater direction because it allows us a closer view of the
scenery and makes a more reasonable use of it, there would really
be no reason to continue with the theater and Pagnol would be a
true prophet. For it is obvious that the few square yards of the
decor of Vilar's La Danse de la mort contributed as much to the
drama as the island on which Marcel Cravene shot his excellent
film. The fact is that the problem lies not in the decor itself but in

103

What Is Cinema?

its nature and function. We must therefore throw some light on an
essentially theatrical notion, that of the dramatic place.

There can be no theater without architecture, whether it be the
cathedral square, the arena of Nimes, the palace of the Popes, the
trestle stage on a fairground, the semicircle of the theater of
Vicenza that looks as if it were decorated by Berard in a delirium,
or the rococo amphitheaters of the boulevard houses. Whether as a
performance or a celebration, theater of its very essence must not
be confused with nature under penalty of being absorbed by her
and ceasing to be. Founded on the reciprocal awareness of those
taking part and present to one another, it must be in contrast to the
rest of the world in the same way that play and reality are opposed,
or concern and indifference, or liturgy and the common use of
things. Costume, mask, or make-up, the style of the language, the
footlights, all contribute to this distinction, but the clearest sign of
alt is the stage, the architecture of which has varied from time to
time without ever ceasing to mark out a privileged spot actually or
virtually distinct from nature. It is precisely in virtue of this locus
dmmaticus that decor exists. It serves in greater or less degree to set
the place apart, to specify. Whatever it is, the decor constitutes the
walls of this three-sided box opening onto the auditorium, which
we call the stage. These false perspectives, these facades, these
arbors, have another side which is cloth and nails and wood. Every-
one knows that when the actor "retires to his apartment" from the
yard or from the garden, he is actually going to his dressing room to
take off his make-up. These few square feet of light and illusion are
surrounded by machinery and flanked by wings, the hidden
labyrinths of which do not interfere one bit with the pleasure of the
spectator who is playing the game of theater. Because it is only part
of the architecture of the stage, the decor of the theater is thus an
area materially enclosed, limited, circumscribed, the only dis-
coveries of which are those of our collusive imagination.

Its appearances are turned inward facing the public and the

104

Theater and Cinema — Part Two

footlights. It exists by virtue of its reverse side and its absence from
anything beyond, as the painting exists by virtue of its frame.* Just
as the picture is not to be confounded with the scene it represents
and is not a window in a wall. The stage and the decor where the
action unfolds constitute an aesthetic microcosm inserted perforce into
the universe but essentially distinct from the Nature which surrounds
it.

It is not the same with cinema, the basic principle of which is a
denial of any frontiers to action.

The idea of a locus dramathus is not only alien to, it is essen-
tially a contradiction of the concept of the screen. The screen is not
a frame like that of a picture but a mask which allows only a part of
the action to be seen. When a character moves off screen, we accept
the fact that he is out of sight, but he continues to exist in his own
capacity at some other place in the decor which is hidden from us.
There are no wings to the screen. There could not be without de-
stroying its specific illusion, which is to make of a revolver or of a
face the very center of the universe. In contrast to the stage the
space of the screen is centrifugal. It is because that infinity which
the theater demands cannot be spatial that its area can be none

* The ideal historical example of this theory of theater architecture and its
relations to the stage and the decor is provided by the Palladium with the
extraordinary Olympic Theater of Vicenza, making of the ancient amphi-
theater open to the sky a purely architectural trompe-Voeil, There is not a
single element, including the entrance to the auditorium, which is not an
affirmation of its essentially architectural nature. Built in 1590. inside an old
barracks donated by the town, outwardly the Olympic Theater appears to be
just red-brick walls, that is, a purely utilitarian piece of architecture which
one might describe as amorphous in the sense in which chemists distinguish
between the amorphous state and the crystal state of the same body. The vis-
itor going in by what appears to be a hole in the wall cannot believe his eyes
when he finds himself all of a sudden in the extraordinary hollowed-out grolto
which constitutes the semicircle of the theater. Like those blocks of quartz or
amethyst which outwardly look like common stones whereas inside they are a
composite of pure crystal, secretly oriented inward, the theater of Vicenza is
conceived according to the laws of an aesthetic and artificial space polarized
exclusively towards the center.

105

other than the human soul. Enclosed in this space the actor is at the
focus of a two-fold concave mirror. From the auditorium and from
the decor there converge on him the dim lights of conscious human
beings and of the footlights themselves. But the fire with which he
burns is at once that of his inner passion and of that focal point at
which he stands. He lights up in each member of his audience an
accomplice flame. Like the ocean in a sea shell the dramatic infini-
ties of the human heart moan and beat between the enclosing walls
of the theatrical sphere. This is why this dramaturgy is in its essence
human. Man is at once its cause and its subject.

On the screen man is no longer the focus of the drama, but will
become eventually the center of the universe. The impact of his
action may there set in motion an infinitude of waves. The decor
that surrounds him is part of the solidity of the world. For this
reason the actor as such can be absent from it, because man in the
world enjoys no a priori privilege over animals and things. However
there is no reason why he should not be the mainspring of the
drama, as in Dreyer's Jeanne d'Arc t and in this respect the cinema
may very well impose itself upon the theater. As actions Phedre or
King Lear are no less cinematogaphic than theatrical, and the
visible death of a rabbit in La Regie du jeu affects us just as deeply
as that of Agnes' little cat about which we are merely told.

But if Racine, Shakespeare, or Moliere cannot be brought to the
cinema by just placing them before the camera and the micro-
phone, it is because the handling of the action and the style of the
dialogue were conceived as echoing through the architecture of the
auditorium. What is specifically theatrical about these tragedies is
not their action so much as the human, that is to say the verbal,
priority given to their dramatic structure. The problem of filmed
theater at least where the classics are concerned does not consist so
much in transposing an action from the stage to the screen as in
transposing a text written for one dramaturgical system into an-
other while at the same time retaining its effectiveness. It is not
therefore essentially the action of a play which resists film adapta-

106

Theater and Cinema — Part Two

tion, but above and beyond the phases of the intrigue (which it
would be easy enough to adapt to the realism of the screen) it is
the verbal form which aesthetic contingencies or cultural prejudices
oblige us to respect. It is this which refuses to let itself be captured
in the window of the screen. "The theater," says Baudelaire, "is a
crystal chandelier." If one were called upon to offer in comparison a
symbol other than this artificial crystal-like object, brilliant, intri-
cate, and circular, which refracts the light which plays around its
center and holds us prisoners of its aureole, we might say of the
cinema that it is the little flashlight of the usher, moving like an
uncertain comet across the night of our waking dream, the diffuse
space without shape or frontiers that surrounds the screen.

The story of the failures and recent successes of theater on film
will be found to be that of the ability of directors to retain the
dramatic force of the play in a medium that reflects it or, at least,
the ability to give this dramatic force enough resonance to permit a
film audience to perceive it. In other words, it is a matter of an
aesthetic that is not concerned with the actor but with decor and
editing. Henceforth it is clear that filmed theater is basically des-
tined to fail whenever it tends in any manner to become simply the
photographing of scenic representation even and perhaps most of
all when the camera is used to try and make us forget the footlights
and the backstage area. The dramatic force of the text, instead of
being gathered up in the actor, dissolves without echo into the
cinematic ether. This is why a filmed play can show due respect to
the text, be well acted in likely settings, and yet be completely
worthless. This is what happened, to take a convenient example, to
Le Voyageur sans baggages. The play lies there before us appar-
ently true to itself yet drained of every ounce of energy, like a
battery dead from an unknown short. But over and beyond the
aesthetic of the decor we see clearly both on the screen and on the
stage that in the last analysis the problem before us is that of
realism. This is the problem we always end up with when we are
dealing with cinema.

107

f

The Screen and the Realism of Space

The realism of the cinema follows directly from its photographic
nature. Not only does some marvel or some fantastic thing on the
screen not undermine the reality of the image, on the contrary it is
its most valid justification. Illusion in the cinema is not based as it is
in the theater on convention tacitly accepted by the general public;
rather, contrariwise, it is based on the inalienable realism of that
which is shown. All trick work must be perfect in all material
respects on the screen. The "invisible man" must wear pyjamas and
smoke a cigarette.

Must we conclude from this that the cinema is dedicated en-
tirely to the representation if not of natural reality at least of a
plausible reality of which the spectator admits the identity with
nature as he knows it? The comparative failure of German ex-
pressionism would seem to confirm this hypothesis, since it is evi-
dent that Caligari attempted to depart from realistic decor under
the influence of the theater and painting. But this would be to offer
an oversimplified explanation for a problem that calls for more
subtle answers. We are prepared to admit that the screen opens
upon an artificial world provided there exists a common denomi-
nator between the cinematographic image and the world we live in.
Our experience of space is the structural basis for our concept of
the universe. We may say in fact, adapting Henri Gouhier's formu-
la, "the stage welcomes every illusion except the illusion of pres-
ence," that "the cinematographic image can be emptied of all real-
ity save one — the reality of space/'

It is perhaps an overstatement to say "all reality" because it is
difficult to imagine a reconstruction of space devoid of all reference
to nature. The world of the screen and our world cannot be juxta-
posed. The screen of necessity substitutes for it since the very con-

108

J

Theater and Cinema— Part Two

cept of universe is spatially exclusive. For a time, a film is the
Universe, the world, or if you like, Nature. We will see how the
films that have attempted to substitute a fabricated nature and an
artificial world for the world of experience have not all equally
succeeded. Admitting the failure of Caligari and Die Nibelungen
we then ask ourselves how we explain the undoubted success of
Nosferatu and La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, the criterion of success
being that these films have never aged. Yet it would seem at first
sight that the methods of direction belong to the same aesthetic
family, and that viewing the varieties of temperament and period,
one could group these four films together as expressionist as distinct
from realist. However, if we examine them more closely we see that
there are certain basic differences between them. It is clear in the
case of R. Weine and Mumau. Nosferatu plays, for the greater part
of the time, against natural settings whereas the fantastic qualities
of Caligari are derived from deformities of lighting and decor. The
case of Dreyer's Jeanne a" Arc is a little more subtle since at first
sight nature plays a nonexistent role. To put it more directly, the
decor by Jean Hugo is no whit less artificial and theatrical than the
settings of Caligari; the systematic use of close-ups and unusual
angles is well calculated to destroy any sense of space. Regular
cineclub goers know that the film is unfailingly introduced with the
famous story of how the hair of Falconetti was actually cut in the
interests of the film and likewise, the actors, we are told, wore no
make-up. These references to history ordinarily have no more than
gossip value. In this case, they seem to me to hold the aesthetic
secret of the film; the very thing to which it owes its continued
survival. It is precisely because of them that the work of Dreyer
ceases to have anything in common with the theater, and indeed
one might say, with man. The greater recourse Dreyer has exclu-
sively to the human "expression," the more he has to reconvert it
again into Nature. Let there be no mistake, that prodigious fresco
of heads is the very opposite of an actor's film. It is a documentary
of faces. It is not important how well the actors play, whereas the

109

What Is Cinema?

poekmarks on Bishop Cauchon's face and the red patches of Jean
d'Yd are an integral part of the action. In this drama-through-the-
microscope the whole of nature palpitates beneath every pore. The
movement of a wrinkle, the pursing of a Hp are seismic shocks and
the flow of tides, the flux and reflux of this human epidermis. But
for me Dreyer's brilliant sense of cinema is evidenced in the exterior
scene which every other director would assuredly have shot in the
studio. The decor as built evoked a Middle Ages of the theater and
of miniatures. In one sense, nothing is less realistic than this
tribunal in the cemetery or this drawbridge, but the whole is lit by
the light of the sun and the gravedigger throws a spadeful of real
earth into the hole.*

It is these "secondary" details, apparently aesthetically at odds
with the rest of the work, which give it its truly cinematic quality.

If the paradox of the cinema is rooted in the dialectic of con-
crete and abstract, if cinema is committed to communicate only by
way of what is real, it becomes all the more important to discern
those elements in filming which confirm our sense of natural reality
and those which destroy that feeling. On the other hand, it certainly
argues a lack of perception to derive one's sense of reality from
these accumulations of factual detail. It is possible to argue that Les
Dames du Bois de Boulogne is an eminently realistic film, though
everything about it is stylized. Everything, except for the rarely
noticeable sound of a windshield-wiper, the murmur of a waterfall,
or the rushing sound of soil escaping from a broken vase. These are
the noises, chosen precisely for their "indifference" to the action,
that guarantee its reality.

The cinema being of its essence a dramaturgy of Nature, there
can be no cinema without the setting up of an open space in place
of the universe rather than as part of it. The screen cannot give us

* This is why I consider the graveyard scene in Hamlet and the death of
Ophelia bad mistakes on Olivier's part. He had here a chance to introduce sun
and soil by way of counterpoint to the setting of Elsinore. Does the actual
shot of the sea during the soliloquy of Hamlet show that he had sensed the
need for this? The idea, excellent in itself, is not well handled technically.

110

Theater and Cinema — Part Two

the illusion of this feeling of space without calling on certain natu-
ral guarantees. But it is less a question of set construction or of
architecture or of immensity than of isolating the aesthetic catalyst,
which it is sufficient to introduce in an infinitesimal dose, to have it
immediately take on the reality of nature.

The concrete forest of Die Nihelungen may well pretend to be
an infinite expanse. We do not believe it to be so, whereas the
trembling of just one branch in the wind, and the sunlight, would
be enough to conjure up all the forests of the world.

If this analysis be well founded, then we see that the basic
aesthetic problem of filmed theater is indeed that of the decor. The
trump card that the director must hold is the reconversion into a
window onto the world of a space oriented toward an interior
dimension only, namely the closed and conventional area of the
theatrical play.

It is not in Laurence Olivier's Hamlet that the text seems to be
rendered superfluous or its strength diminished by directorial inter-
pretations, still less in Welles* Macbeth, but paradoxically in the
stage productions of Gaston Baty, to the precise extent that they go
out of their way to create a cinematographic space on the stage; to
deny that the settings have a reverse side, thus reducing the sonor-
ity of the text simply to the vibration of the voice of the actor who
is left without his "resonance box" like a violin that is nothing else
but strings. One would never deny that the essential thing in the
theater is the text. The latter conceived for the anthropocentric
expression proper to the stage and having as its function to bring
nature to it cannot, without losing its raison d'etre, be used in a
space transparent as glass. The problem then that faces the film-
maker is to give his decor a dramatic opaqueness while at the same
time reflecting its natural realism. Once this paradox of space has
been dealt with, the director, so far from hesitating to bring theatri-
cal conventions and faithfulness to the text to the screen will find
himself now, on the contrary, completely free to rely on them.
From that point on it is no longer a matter of running away from

111

those things which "make theater" but in the long run to acknowl-
edge their existence by rejecting the resources of the cinema, as
Cocteau did in Les Parents terribles and Welles in Macbeth, or by
putting them in quotation marks as Laurence Olivier did in Henry
V. The evidence of a return to filmed theater that we have had
during the last ten years belongs essentially to the history of decor
and editing. It is a conquest of realism — not, certainly, the realism
of subject matter or realism of expression but that realism of space
without which moving pictures do not constitute cinema.

An Analogy from Play -Acting

This progress in filmed theater has only been possible insofar as the
opposition between them did not rest on the ontological category of
presence but on a psychology of "play." In passing from one to the
other, one goes from the absolute to the relative, from antinomy to
simple contradiction. While the cinema cannot offer the spectator
the community feeling of theater, a certain knowledge of direction
will allow him finally, and this is a decisive factor, to preserve the
meaning and force of the text. The grafting of the theatrical text
onto the decor of cinema is an operation which today we know can
be successful. There remains that awareness of the active opposi-
tion existing between the spectator and the actor which constitutes
the "play" of theater and is symbolized by scenic architecture. But
there is a way of reducing even this to the psychology of the cine-
matic.

The reasoning of Rosenkrantz concerning opposition and identi-
fication requires in effect an important correction. It carries with it,
still, a measure of equivocation. Rosenkrantz seems to equate identi-
fication with passivity and escape — an accepted fact in his time be-
cause of the condition of the cinema but less and less so in its pres-
ent stage of evolution. Actually the cinema of myth and dream is

112

Theater and Cinema — Part Two

now only one variety of production and one that is less and less
frequent. One must not confuse an accidental and historical so-
cial condition with an unalterable psychological one — two activ-
ities, that is to say, of the spectator's consciousness that converge
but are not part of one another. 1 do not identify equally with
Tarzan and Bresson's cure. The only denominator common to
my attitude to these two heroes is that I believe that they really
exist, that I cannot refuse, except by staying away from the film, to
share their adventures and to live them through with them, inside
their universe, a universe that is not metaphorical and figurative but
spatially real. This interior sharing does not exclude, in the second
example, a consciousness of myself as distinct from the person from
whom I chose to be alienated in the first example. These factors
originating in the affective order are not the only ones that argue
against passive identification; films like L'Espoir or Citizen Kane
require in the spectator an intellectual alertness incompatible with
passivity. The most that one can suggest is that the psychology of
the cinematographic image offers a natural incline leading towards
a sociology of the hero characterized by a passive identification. But
in the arts as in morals, inclines are also made to be climbed. While
the contemporary man of the theater often tries to lessen the sense
of theatricality in a performance by a kind of realism in the
production — just as those who love to go to the Grand Guignol play
at being frightened but hold on at the very height of the horror to a
delicious awareness of being fooled — the film director discovers on
his side means of exciting the awareness of the spectator and of
provoking him to reflection. This is something which would set up a
conflict at the very heart of the identification. This private zone of
consciousness, this self-awareness at the height of illusion, creates a
kind of private footlights. In filmed theater it is no longer the
microcosm of the play which is set over against nature but the
spectator who is conscious of himself. On the screen Hamlet and
Les Parents terribles cannot nor should they escape from the laws
of cinematic perception; Elsrnore and "La Roulotte" really exist but

113

I pass through them unseen, rejoicing in that equivocal freedom
which certain dreams allow us. I am walking but moving back-
wards.

Certainly the possibility of a state of intellectual self-awareness
at the moment of psychological identification should never be con-
fused with that act of the will which constitutes theater, and that is
why it is foolish to identify stage and screen as Pagnol does. No
matter how conscious of myself, how intelligent a film can make
me, it is not to my will that it appeals — only at most to my good
will. A film calls for a certain effort on my part so that I may
understand and enjoy it, but it does not depend on me for its
existence. Nevertheless it would certainly seem, from experience,
that the margin of awareness allowed by the cinema is enough to
establish an acceptable equivalent to the pleasure given by theater,
at least enough to preserve what is essential to the artistic values of
the play. The film, while it cannot pretend to be a complete substi-
tute for the stage performance, is at least capable of assuring the
theater a valid artistic existence and can offer us a comparable
pleasure. There can never be question of anything more than a
complex mechanical aesthetic where the original theatrical effec-
tiveness is almost never directly applied, rather it is preserved, re-
constituted, and transmitted thanks to a system of circuits, as in
Henry V, of amplification as for example in Macbeth, of induction
or interference. The true filmed theater is not the phonograph, it is
its Martenot wave.

Morality

Thus the practice (certain) like the theory (possible) of successful
filmed theater reveals the reasons for former failures. Straightfor-
ward animated photography of theater is a childish error recog-
nized as such these thirty years and on which there is no point in

114

Theater and Cinema—Part Two

insisting further. The heresy of film adaptation has taken longer to
smoke out. It will continue to have its dupes but we now know
where it leads — to aesthetic limbos that belong neither to film nor
to theater, to that "filmed theater" justly condemned as the sin
against the spirit of cinema. The true solution, revealed at last,
consists in realizing that it is not a matter of transferring to the
screen the dramatic element — an element interchangeable between
one art and another — of a theatrical work, but inversely the theatri-
cal quality of the drama. The subject of the adaptation is not that
of the play, it is the play precisely in its scenic essence. This truth,
apparent at last, will allow us to reach a conclusion concerning
three propositions seemingly paradoxical at first, but which on re-
flection are seen to be quite evident.

(7) Theater an Aid to Cinema

The first proposition is that so far from being a corruption of
cinema, filmed theater serves on the contrary to enrich and elevate
it. Let us first look at the matter of theater. It is alas only too certain
that the level of film production is intellectually much below, if not
that of current dramatic production-think of Jean de Letraz and
Henry Bernstein — at least of the living heritage of theater, even if
only because of its great age. True, our century is no less that of
Charlie Chaplin than was the seventeenth century that of Racine
and Moliere, but after all the cinema has only half a century of
literature behind it while the theater has twenty-five. What would
the French theater be like today if, as is the case with the cinema, it
had nothing to offer but the production of the past decade? Since
the cinema is undeniably passing through a crisis of subject matter
it is not risking anything by employing screen writers like Shake-
speare or even Feydeau. Let us not labor the subject. The case is
only too clear. However, the inferiority is less evident in the realm

115

of form. If the cinema is a major art with its own laws and lan-
guage, what can it gain by submitting to the laws and language of
another art? A great deal! And precisely to the extent to which,
laying aside all its vain and puerile tricks, it is seriously concerned
to subordinate itself and render a service. To justify this point of
view completely, one should really discuss it within the framework
of the aesthetic history of influence in art in general. This would
almost certainly reveal, we feel, that at some stage in their evolu-
tion there has been a definite commerce between the technique of
the various arts. Our prejudice about "pure art" is a critical devel-
opment of relatively recent origin. But the authority of these prece-
dents is not indispensable to our argument. The art of direction, the
mechanics of which in relation to certain major films, as we have
had to explain earlier, more even than our theoretical hypotheses,
supposes on the part of the director a grasp of the language of
cinematography equalled only by his knowledge of what theater is.
If the film d'art failed where Olivier and Cocteau have succeeded, it
is first of all because they have at their disposal a much more
developed means of expression, but they also know how to use it
more effectively than their contemporaries. To say of Les Parents
terribles that it is perhaps an excellent film but that it is not cinema
because it follows the play step by step is critical nonsense. On the
contrary, it is precisely for this reason that it is cinema. It is Topaze
by Marcel Pagnol — in its most recent style — which is not cinema,
precisely because it is no longer theater. There is more cinema, and
great cinema at that, in Henry V alone than in 90% of original
scripts. Pure poetry is certainly not that which has nothing to say,
as Cocteau has so well demonstrated: all the examples of pure
poetry given by the Abbe Bremond illustrate the exact opposite.
La Fille de Minos et Pasiphae is as informative as a birth certificate.
There is likewise a way, unfortunately not yet practiced, of reciting
this poem on the screen which would be pure cinema because it
would respect, in the most intelligent way, its true theatrical value.
The more the cinema intends to be faithful to the text and to its

116

Theater and Cinema — Part Two

theatrical requirements, the more of necessity must it delve deeper
into its own language. The best translation is that which demon-
strates a close intimacy with the genius of both languages and,
likewise, a mastery of both.

(2) The Cinema Will Save the Theater

That is why the cinema will give back to the theater unstintingly
what it took from her, if it has not already done so. For if the
success of filmed theater supposes that dialectical progress had
been made with the cinematic form, it implies both reciprocally and
a fortiori a reevaluation of the essentially theatrical. The idea ex-
ploited by Marcel Pagnol according to which the cinema will re-
place the theater by "canning it" is completely false. The screen
cannot replace the stage as the piano has supplanted the clavichord.
And to begin with, replace the theater for whom? Not for the film-
going public that long ago deserted the theater. The divorce be-
tween public and theater does not date, so far as I know, from that
historic evening at the Grand Cafe in 1895. Are we talking then
about the privileged minority of culture and wealth which actually
makes up the theater audiences? But we see that Jean de Letraz is
not bankrupt and that the visitor to Paris from the provinces does
not confuse the breasts of Francoise Arnoul that he has seen on the
screen with those of Nathalie Nattier at the Palais-Royal, although
the latter may be covered by a brassiere; but they are there, if I
may say so, "in the flesh." Ah! The irreplaceable presence of the
actor! As for the "serious" theaters, say the Marigny or the Franeais,
it is clearly a question of a public that, for the most part, does not
go to the cinema and, for the others, of people who go to both
without confusing the pleasure to be derived from each. The fact is,
if any ground has been taken over it is not the territory of the
theatrical spectacle as it exists, it is much more the taking over of

117

the place abandoned long ago by the now-defunct forms of popular
theater. So far from being a serious rival to the stage, the cinema is
in process of giving back, to a public that had lost it, a taste and
feeling for theater.*

It is possible that canned theater had something to do at the
time with the disappearance of touring companies from the road.
When Marcel Pagnol makes a film of Topaze, there is no doubt
about his intentions, namely to make his play available to the prov-
inces with a "Paris cast" at the price of a cinema seat. It is often the
same with the boulevard plays. Their successful run finished, the
film is distributed to those who were unable to see the play. In
those areas where the Baret touring companies performed with a
second-rate cast, the film offers at a very reasonable price not only
the original cast, but even more magnificent sets. But this illusion
was really successful for only a few years and we now see provin-
cial tours on the road again, the better for their experience. The
public they have recaptured, made blase by the cinema and its
glamorous casting and its luxurious sets, has, "come to," as they say,
and is looking for something that is, more or less, theater.

But the popularizing of Paris successes is still not the ultimate
end of the theatrical revival nor is it the chief merit of the "competi-
tion" between screen and stage. One might even say that this im-
provement in the situation of the touring companies is due to badly
filmed theater. It is the defects of these films that have finally
turned the stomachs of a section of the public and sent them back
into the theaters.

* The case of the Theatre Nationale Populaire offers another unexpected
and paradoxical example of support for the theater by the cinema. I presume
that Jean Vilar would not dispute the undoubted help his enterprise gets from
the film fame of Gerard Philipe. Actually in doing this the cinema is only
paying back to the theater a part of the capital it borrowed some forty years
ago in the heroic period when the infant film industry, an object of contempt,
had recourse to stage celebrities who could provide the artistic discipline and
prestige it needed before it could be taken seriously. Certainly the situation
was soon enough reversed. The Sarah Bernhardt of the years between the wars
went by the name of Greta Garbo and it is now the theater that is willing to ad-
vertise the name of a film star on its marquees.

118

Theater and Cinema — Part Two

It was the same situation with regard to photography and paint-
ing. Photography freed painting from what was aesthetically least
essential to it; likeness and anecdote. The high standard and the
lower cost of photography and the ease with which pictures are
taken, has at last contributed to the due evaluation of painting and
to establishing it unalterably in its proper place. Bat this is not the
end of the benefits derived from their coexistence. The photogra-
phers have not just served as the helots of the painters. At the same
time, as it became more conscious of itself, painting absorbed some-
thing of photography. It is Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir
and Manet, who have understood from the inside, and in essence,
the nature of the photographic phenomenon and, prophetically,
even the cinematographic phenomenon. Faced with photography,
they opposed it in the only valid way, by a dialectical enriching of
pictorial technique. They understood the laws of the new image
better than the photographers and well before the movie-makers,
and it is they who first applied them.

Nevertheless this is not all and photography is in process of
rendering services to the plastic arts that are even more decisive
still. Their fields henceforth clearly known and delimited, the auto-
matic image multiplies and renews our knowledge of the pictorial
image. Malraux has said what needed to be said on this. If painting
has been able to become the most individual of arts, the most
onerous, the most independent of all compromise while at the same
time the most accessible, it is thanks to color photography.

The same process applies to the theater; bad "canned theater"
has helped true theater to become aware of its own laws. The
cinema has likewise contributed to a new concept of theatrical
production. These are results henceforth firmly established. But
there is a third result which good filmed theater permits us to look
for, namely the remarkable increase in breadth of understanding of
theater among the general public. What then is a film like Henry V?
First of all, it is Shakespeare for everybody. Furthermore, and su-
premely, it is a blazing light thrown onto the dramatic poetry of

119

What Is Cinema?

Shakespeare — the most effective and brilliant of theater lessons.
Shakespeare emerges from the process twice himself. Not only does
the adaptation of the play multiply his potential audience in the
same way that the adaptation of novels makes the fortune of pub-
lishers, but also, the public is far better prepared than before to
enjoy the stage play. Laurence Olivier's Hamlet must obviously
increase the audience for Jean-Louis Barrault's Hamlet and sharpen
the critical sense. Just as there is a difference that can never be
bridged between the finest modern reproduction of a painting and
the pleasure of owning the original, seeing Hamlet on the screen
cannot take the place of a performance of the play by, say, a group
of English students. But you need a genuine education in theater to
appreciate the real-life performance by amateurs, that is to be able
truly to share in what they are doing. So the more successful the
filmed theater, the deeper it probes into the essence of theater, the
better to serve it, the more clearly it will reveal the unbridgeable
gulf between stage and screen. It is, on the contrary, the canned
theater on the one hand and mediocre popular theater on the other
that give rise to the confusion. Les Parents ierribles never misleads
its audience. There is not a sequence in it that is not more effective
than its stage counterpart, while there is not one which does not
allude by implication to that indefinable pleasure that I would have
had from the real thing. There is no better propaganda for the real
theater than well-filmed theater. These truths are henceforth indis-
putable and it would have been ridiculous of me to have spent so
much time on them if the myth about filmed theater did not still
survive too frequently in the form of prejudice, of misunderstand-
ing, and of minds already made up.

(3) From Filmed Theater to Cinematographic Theater

My last argument, I realize, will be the boldest. So far we have
considered the theater as an aesthetic absolute to which the cinema

120

Theater and Cinema — Part Two

can come close in a more or less satisfactory fashion, but only in all
circumstances and under the best possible conditions, as its humble
servant. However, the earlier part of our study allowed us to see in
slapstick the rebirth of dramatic forms that had practically disap-
peared, such as farce and the Commedia dell' Arte. Certain dra-
matic situations, certain techniques that had degenerated in the
course of time, found again, in the cinema, first the sociological
nourishment they needed to survive and, still better, the conditions
favorable to an expansive use of their aesthetic, which the theater
had kept congenitally atrophied. In making a protagonist out of
space, the screen does not betray the spirit of farce, it simply gives
to the metaphysical meaning of Scarpin's stick its true dimensions,
namely those of the whole universe. Slapstick is first and foremost,
or at least is also, the dramatic expression of the tyranny of things,
out of which Keaton even more than Chaplin knew how to create a
tragedy of the Object. But it is true that the forms of comedy create
something of a special problem in the history of filmed theater,
probably because laughter allows the audience to become aware of
itself and to use this to experience a measure of the opposition that
theater creates between actor and audience. In any case, and that is
why we have not gone farther into the study of it, the grafting
together of cinema and comedy-theater happened spontaneously
and has been so perfect that its fruit has always been accepted as
the product of pure cinema.

Now that the screen can welcome other kinds of theater besides
comedy without betraying them, there is no reason to suppose that
it cannot likewise give the theater new life, employing certain of the
stage's own techniques. Film cannot be, indeed must not be, as we
have seen, simply a paradoxical modality of theater production, but
stage structures have their importance and it is not a matter of
indifference whether Julius Caesar is played in the arena at Nimes
or in a studio; but certain dramatic works, and by no means the
least of them, have suffered in a very material way these thirty to
fifty years from a discord between contemporary taste and the style
of the staging that they call for. I am thinking particularly of

121

tragedy. There, the handicap we suffer from is due especially to the
disappearance of the race of traditional tragedians of the old
school — the Mounet-SuOys and the Sarah Bernhardts, that is, who
disappeared at the beginning of the century like prehistoric crea-
tures of the secondary period. By a stroke of irony, it is the cinema
that has preserved their bones, fossilized in the films d'art. It has
become a commonplace to attribute their disappearance to the
cinema and for two converging reasons: one aesthetic, the other
sociological. The screen has certainly modified our feeling about
verisimilitude in interpretation. It is enough to see one of the little
films of Bernhardt or Bargy to understand that this type of actor
was still trussed up to all intents and purposes in cothurnus and
mask. But the mask is simply an object of laughter while a close-up
can drown us in a tear, and the megaphone is ridiculous when the
microphone can produce at will a roar from the feeblest vocal
chords. Thus we are accustomed to the inner naturalness which
only allows the stage actor a slender margin of stylization beyond
verisimilitude. The sociological factor is probably even more deci-
sive. The success and effectiveness of a Mounet-Sully was undoubt-
edly due to his talent but helped on by the consenting complicity of
the public. It was the phenomenon of the monstre sacre which is
today diverted almost exclusively to the cinema. To say that the
classes at the Conservatory do not produce any more tragedians
doesn't by any means imply that no more Sarah Bernhardts are
being born, only that their gifts and the times do not consort well.
Thus, Voltaire wore out his lungs plagiarizing the tragedy of the
seventeenth century because he thought that it was only Racine
who had died when actually it was tragedy itself. Today we see not
the slightest difference between Mounet-Sully and a ham from tie
provinces because we could not recognize a tragedian of the old
school when we saw one. Only the "monster" survives in the film
d'art for a young man today. The sacred quality has departed.

In the circumstances it is not surprising that Racine's tragedy is
in a period of eclipse. Thanks to its conservative attitude, the

122

Theater and Cinema — Part Two

Comedie Francaise is in the fortunate position of being able to
guarantee him a reasonable life, but no longer a triumphal one.*
Furthermore, this is only because of an interesting filtering-through
of traditional values, their delicate adaptation to modern tastes, and
not by a radical renewal straight out of the period. As for ancient
tragedy, it is paradoxically to the Sorbonne and to the archeological
enthusiasm of students that it owes the fact that it moves us once
more. But it is important to see in these experiments by amateurs
an extremely radical reaction against the actor's theater.

Thus, is it not natural to think that if the cinema has completely
turned to its own advantage the aesthetic and the sociology of the
sacred monster, that it might return them if the theater came look-
ing for them? It is reasonable enough to dream what an Athalie
could have been with Yvonne de Bray and Jean Cocteau directing!

But doubtless it would not be just the style of the interpretation
of tragedy that would find its raison d'etre once more on the
screen. One could well imagine a corresponding revolution on the
stage which, without ceasing to be faithful to the spirit of the
theater, would offer it new forms in keeping with modern taste and
especially at the level of a great mass audience. Film theater is
waiting for a Jean Cocteau to make it a cinematographic theater.

Thus not only is theater on film from now on aesthetically
founded in truth and fact, not only do we know that henceforth
there are no plays that cannot be brought to the screen, whatever
their style, provided one can visualize a reconversion of stage space
in accordance with the data. But it may also be that the only
possible modern theatrical production of certain classics would be
on the screen. It is no chance matter that some of the best film-
makers are also the best stage directors. Welles and Olivier did not

* Triumph is precisely what Henry V is, thanks to color film. If one were
searching through Phidre for an example of cinematic potentiality, the re-
cital of Theramine, a verbal reminiscence of the tragicomedie a machines,
considered as a dramatically literary piece, dramatically out of place, would
find, visually, a new raison d'etre on the screen.

123

What Is Cinema?

come to the cinema out of cynicism, snobbery, or ambition, not
even, like Pagnol, to popularize theatrical works. Cinema is for
them only a complementary form of theater, the chance to produce
theater precisely as they feel and see it.

124

LE JOURNAL D'UN CURE DE CAMPAGNE
AND THE STYLISTICS OF ROBERT BRESSON

if The Diary of a Country Priest impresses us as a masterpiece, and
this with an almost physical impact, if it moves the critic and the
uncritical alike, it is primarily because of its power to stir the emo-
tions, rather than the intelligence, at their highest level of sensitiv-
ity. The temporary eclipse of Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne was
for precisely the opposite reason. This film could not stir us unless
we had, if not exactiy analyzed, at least tested its intellectual struc-
ture and, so to speak, understood the rules of the game.

While the instantaneous success of Le Journal is undeniable, the
aesthetic principles on which it is based are nevertheless the most
paradoxical, maybe even the most complex, ever manifest in a
sound film. Hence the refrain of those critics, ill-equipped to under-
stand it. "Paradoxical," they say, "incredible — an unprecedented
success that can never be repeated." Thus they renounce any at-
tempt at explanation and take refuge in the perfect alibi of a stroke
of genius. On the other hand, among those whose aesthetic prefer-
ences are of a kind with Bresson's and whom one would have
unhesitatingly thought to be his allies, there is a deep sense of
disappointment in proportion as they expected greater acts of dar-
ing from him.

125

First embarrassed, then irritated by the realization of what the
director did not do, yet too long in accord with him to be able to
change their views on the spot; too caught up in his style to recap-
ture their intellectual virginity which would have left the way open
to emotion, they have neither understood nor liked the film.

Thus we find the critical field divided into two extreme groups.
At one end those least equipped to understand Le Journal and who,
by the same token, have loved it all the more without knowing
why; at the other end those "happy few" who, expecting something
different, have not liked it and have failed to understand it. It is the
strangers to the cinema, the men of letters, amazed that they could
so love a film and be capable of freeing their minds of prejudice,
who have understood what Bresson had in mind more clearly than
anyone else.

Admittedly Bresson has done his best to cover his tracks. His
avowal of fidelity to the original from the first moment that he
embarked on the adaptation, his declared intention of following the
book word-for-word conditioned us to look for just that and the film
only serves to prove it. Unlike Aurenche and Bost, who were pre-
occupied with the optics of the screen and the balance of their
drama in its new form, Bresson, instead of building up the minor
characters like the parents in Le Diable au corps, eliminated them.
He prunes even the very essentials, giving an impression as he does
so of a fidelity unable to sacrifice one single word without a pucker
of concern and a thousand preliminary twinges of remorse. Again
this pruning is always in the interest of simplification, never of
addition. It is no exaggeration to say that if Bernanos had written
the screenplay he would have taken greater liberties with his novel.
He had, indeed, explicitly recognized the right of the adaptor to
make use of his book according to the requirements of the cinema,
the right that is "to dream his story over."

However, if we praise Bresson for his fidelity, it is for the most
insidious kind of fidelity, a most pervasive form of creative license.
Of course, one clearly cannot adapt without transposing. In that

126

The Stylistics of Robert Bresson

respect, Bernanos was on the side of aesthetic common sense.
Literal translations are not the faithful ones. The changes that
Aurenche and Bost made to Le Diable au corps are almost all
entirely justified in principle. A character on the screen and the
same character as evoked by the novelist are not identical.

Valery condemned the novel for being obliged to record that
"the Marquise had tea at five o'clock." On his side, the novelist might
in turn pity the film-maker for having to show the marquise actually
at the table. It is for this reason that the relatives of the heroes in
Radiguet, peripheral in the novel, appear important on the screen.
The adaptor, however, must be as concerned with the text as with
the characters and with the threat of their physical presence to the
balance of the story. Having transformed the narrative into visuals,
the film-maker must put the rest into dialogue, including the exist-
ing dialogue of the novel although we expect some modification of
the latter — since spoken as written, its effectiveness and even its
meaning will normally evaporate.

It is here that we see the paradoxical effect of the textual fidelity
of Le Journal.

While the characters in the book are presented to the reader in
high relief and while their inevitably brief evocation by the pen of
the cure of Ambricourt never gives us a feeling of frustration or of
any limits being put both to their existence and to our knowledge of
their existence, Bresson, in the process of showing them to us, is
forever hurrying them out of sight. In place of the powerfully con-
crete evocations of the novelist, the film offers us an increasingly
impoverished image which escapes us because it is hidden from us
and is never really developed.

The novel of Bernanos is rich in picturesque evocations, solid,
concrete, strikingly visual. For example; "The Count went out — his
excuse the rain. With every step the water oozed from his long
boots. The three or four rabbits he had shot were lumped together
in the bottom of his game-bag in a horrible-looking little pile of
bloodstained mud and grey hair. He had hung the string bag on the

127

W hat Is Cinema?

wall and as he talked to me I saw fixed on me, through the inter-
twining cords, a still limpid and gentle eye.**

Do you feel you have seen all this somewhere before? Don't
bother to look where. It was probably in a Renoir film. Now com-
pare this scene with the other in which the count brings the two
rabbits to the presbytery — admittedly this comes later in the book
but the two could have profitably been combined, thus giving them
a style in common — and if you still have any doubts, Bresson's own
admission will remove them. Forced to throw out a third of his final
cut for the exhibitor's copy he ended, as we know, by declaring
with a delicate touch of cynicism that he was delighted to have had
to do so. Actually, the only "visual" he really cared about was the
blank screen at the finale, which we will discuss later.

If he had really been faithful to the book, Bresson would have
made quite a different film. Determined though he was to add
nothing to the original — already a subtle form of betrayal by
omission — he might at least have chosen to sacrifice the more liter-
ary parts for the many passages of ready-made film material that
cried out for visualization. Yet he systematically took the opposite
course. When you compare the two, it is the film that is literary
while the novel teems with visual material.

The way he handles the text is even more revealing. He refuses
to put into dialogue (I hardly dare to say "film dialogue") those
passages from the novel where the cure" enters in his diary the
report of such-and-such a conversation. Here is a first discrepancy,
since Bernanos at no point guarantees that the cure" is giving a
word for word report of what he heard. The odds are that he is not.
In any event, supposing he is, and that Bresson has it in mind to
preserve, along with the objective image, the subjective character
of something remembered, it is still true that the mental and emo-
tional impact of a line that is merely read is very different from that
of a spoken line.

Now, not only does he not adapt the dialogue, however cir-
cumspectly, to the demands of a performance, he goes out of his

128

The Stylistics of Robert Bresson

way, on the contrary, whenever the text of the novel has the rhythm
and balance of true dialogue, to prevent the actor from bringing
out these qualities. Thus a good deal of excellent dramatic dialogue
is thrown away because of the flat monotone in which the director
insists that it be delivered.

Many complimentary things have been said about Les Dames
du Bois de Boulogne, very little about the adaptation. The critics
have, to all intents and purposes, treated the film as if it was made
from an original screenplay. The outstanding quality of the dia-
logue has been attributed to Cocteau, whose reputation has little
need of such praise. This is because they have not reread Jacques le
fataliste, in which they would have found if not the entire script, at
least the evidence of a subtle game of hide and go seek, word for
word, with the text of Diderot. While it did not make one feel one
ought to go back to verify the fact at close quarters, the modern
version left one with the impression that Bresson had taken liberties
with the story and retained simply the situation and, if you like, a
certain eighteenth-century flavor. Since, in addition, he had killed
off two or three writers under him, so to speak, it was reasonable to
suppose that he was that many steps away from the original. How-
ever I recommend fans of the Dames du Bois de Boulogne and
aspiring scenarists alike to take a second look at the film with these
considerations in mind. Without intending in any way to detract
from the decisive part played by the style of the direction in the
success of the film, it is important to examine very closely the
foundations of this success, namely a marvellously subtle inter-
play — a sort of counterpoint between faithfulness and unfaithful-
ness to the original.

It has bean suggested in criticism of Les Dames du Bois de
Boulogne, with equal proportions of good sense and misunderstand-
ing, that the psychological make-up of the characters is out of key
with the society in which they are shown as living. True, it is the
mores of the time that, in the novel of Diderot, justify the choice of

129

the revenge and give it its effectiveness. It is true again that this
same revenge seems to the modern spectator to be something out of
the blue, something beyond his experience. It is equally useless on
the other hand for those who defend the film to look for any sort of
social justification for the characters. Prostitution and pandering as
shown in the novel are facts with a very clear and solid contem-
porary social context. In the film of Les Dames they are all the
more mystifying since they have no basic justification. The revenge
of an injured mistress who forces her unfaithful lover to marry a
luscious cabaret dancer seems to us to be a ridiculous gesture. Nor
can the fact that the characters appear to be abstractions be ex-
plained by deliberate cuts made by the director during the filming.
They are that way in the script. The reason Bresson does not tell us
more about his characters is not because he has no desire to, but
because he would be hard put to do so. Racine does not describe
the color of the wall paper in the rooms to which his characters
retire. To this one may answer, of course, that classical tragedy has
no need of the alibis of realism and that this is one of the basic
differences between the theater and the cinema. That is true
enough. It is also precisely why Bresson does not derive his
cinematographic abstraction simply from the bare episodes but
from the counterpoint that the reality of the situation sets up with
itself. In Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, Bresson has taken the
risk of transferring one realistic story into the context of another.
The result is that these two examples of realism cancel one another
out, the passions displayed emerge out of the characters as if from a
chrysalis, the action from the twists and turns of the plot, and the
tragedy from the trappings of the drama. The sound of a
windshield-wiper against a page of Diderot is all it took to turn it
into Racinian dialogue. Obviously Bresson is not aiming at absolute
realism. On the other hand, his stylized treatment of it does not
have the pure abstract quality of a symbol. It is rather a structured
presentation of the abstract and concrete, that is to say of the
reciprocal interplay of seemingly incompatible elements. The rain,

ISO

The Stylistics of Robert Bresson

the murmur of a waterfall, the sound of earth pouring from a
broken pot, the hooves of a horse on the cobblestones, are not there
just as a contrast to the simplification of the sets or the convention
of the costumes, still less as a contrast to the literary and anachro-
nistic flavor of the dialogue. They are not needed either for dramatic
antithesis or for a contrast in decor. They are there deliberately as
neutrals, as foreign bodies, like a grain of sand that gets into and
seizes up a piece of machinery. If the arbitrariness of their choice
resembles an abstraction, it is the abstraction of the concrete in-
tegral. They are like lines drawn across an image to affirm its trans-
parency, as the dust affirms the transparency of a diamond; it is
impurity at its purest.

This interaction of sound and decor is repeated in the very
midst of elements which seem at first to be completely stylized. For
example, the two apartments of the women are almost totally un-
furnished but this calculated bareness has its explanation. That the
frames should be on the walls though the paintings have been sold
is undoubtedly a deliberate touch of realism. The abstract white-
ness of the new apartment is not intended as part of a pattern of
theatrical expressionism. The apartment is white because it has just
been repainted and the smell of fresh paint still hangs about. Is
there any need to add to this list the elevator or the concierge's
telephone, or, on the sound track, the tumult of male voices that
follows the face-slapping of Agnes, the text for which reads totally
conventionally while the sound quality of it is absolute perfec-
tion.

I have referred to Les Dames in discussing Le Journal because
it is important to point out the profound similarity between the
mechanics of their respective adaptations.

The style of Le Journal indicates a more systematic searching, a

rigor that is almost unbearable. It was made under very different
technical conditions. Yet we shall see that the procedure was in
each case basically the same. In both it was a matter of getting to
the heart of a story or of a drama, of achieving the most rigorous

131

What Is Cinema?

form of aesthetic abstraction while avoiding expressionism by way
of an interplay of literature and realism, which added to its cine-
matic potential while seeming to negate it. In any case, Bresson's
faithfulness to his model is the alibi of liberty in chains. If he is
faithful to the text this is because it serves his purpose better than
taking useless liberties. Furthermore, this respect for the letter is, in
the last analysis, far more than an exquisite embarrassment, it is a
dialectical moment in the creation of a style.

So it is pointless to complain that paradoxically Bresson is at one
and the same time the slave and the master of his text because it is
precisely from this seeming contradiction that he gets his effects.
Henri Agel, for example, describes the film as a page of Victor
Hugo rewritten in the style of de Nerval. But surely one could
imagine poetic results born of this monstrous coupling, of unex-
pectedly revealing flashes touched of! by a translation made not just
from one language into another (like Mallarme's translation of
Poe) but from one style and one content into the style of another
artist and from the material of one art transposed into the material
of another.

Let us look a little more closely now at Le Journal and see what
in it has not really come off. While not wishing to praise Bresson for
all his weak spots, for there are weaknesses, rare ones, which work
to his disadvantage, we can say quite definitely that they are all an
integral part of his style; they are simply that kind of awkwardness
to which a high degree of sensibility may lead, and if Bresson has
any reason here for self-congratulation, it is for having had the
sense to see in that awkwardness the price he must pay for some-
thing more important.

So, even if the acting in general seems poor, except for Laydu
all the time and for Nicole Lamiral some of it, this, provided you
like the film, will only appear to be a minor defect. But now we
have to explain why Bresson who directed his cast so superbly in
Les Anges du peche and Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne seems to
handle them in this film as amateurishly as any tyro with a camera

132

The Stylistics of Robert Bresson

who has roped in his aunt and the family lawyer. Do people really
imagine that it was easier to get Maria Casares to play down her
talent than to handle a group of docile amateurs? Certainly some
scenes were poorly acted. It is odd however that these were by no
means the least moving.

The fact is that this film is not to be measured by ordinary
standards of acting. It is important to remember that the cast were
all either amateurs or simple beginners. Le Journal no more approx-
imates to Ladri di Biciclette than to L'Entree des artistes. Actually
the only film it can be likened to is Carl Dreyer's Jeanne d'Arc. The
cast is not being asked to act out a text, not even to live it out, just
to speak it. It is because of this that the passages spoken off-screen
so perfectly match the passages spoken by the characters on-screen.
There is no fundamental difference either in tone or style. This plan
of attack not only rules out any dramatic interpretation by the
actors but also any psychological touches either. What we are asked
to look for on their faces is not for some fleeting reflection of the
words but for an uninterrupted condition of soul, the outward reve-
lation of an interior destiny.

Thus this so-called badly acted film leaves us with the feeling of
having seen a gallery of portraits whose expressions could not be
other than they were. In this respect the most characteristic of all is
de Chantal in the confessional. Dressed in black, withdrawn into
the shadows, Nicole Lamiral allows us only a glimpse of a mask,
half lit, half in shadow, like a seal stamped on wax, all blurred at
the edges.

Naturally Bresson, like Dreyer, is only concerned with the coun-
tenance as flesh, which, when not involved in playing a role, is a
man's true imprint, the most visible mark of his soul. It is then that
the countenance takes on the dignity of a sign. He would have us
be concerned here not with the psychology but with the physiology
of existence. Hence the hieratic tempo of the acting, the slow am-
biguous gestures, the obstinate recurrence of certain behavioral pat-
terns, the unforgettable dream-like slow motion. Nothing purely

133

1

What Is Cinema?

accidental could happen to these people — confirmed as each is in
his own way of life, essentially concerned either against the influ-
ence of grace, to continue so, or, responding to grace, to throw off
the deadly Nessus-mantle of the old Adam.

There is no development of character. Their inner conflicts, the
various phases of their struggle as they wrestle with the Angel of
the Lord, are never outwardly revealed. What we see is rather a
concentration of suffering, the recurrent spasms of childbirth or of a
snake sloughing off its skin. We can truly say that Bresson strips his
characters bare.

Eschewing psychological analysis, the film in consequence lies
outside the usual dramatic categories. The succession of events is
not constructed according to the usual laws of dramaturgy under
which the passions work towards a soul-satisfying climax. Events do
indeed follow one another according to a necessary order, yet
within a framework of accidental happenings. Free acts and coinci-
dences are interwoven. Each moment in the film, each set-up, has its
own due measure, alike, of freedom and of necessity. They all move
in the same direction, but separately like iron filings drawn to the
overall surface of a magnet. If the word tragedy comes to one's pen,
it is in an opposite sense since we can only be dealing here with a
tragedy freely willed. The transcendence of the Bernanos-Bresson
universe is not the transcendence of destiny as the ancients under-
stood it, nor yet the transcendence of Racinian passion, but the
transcendence of grace which is something each of us is free to
refuse.

If nevertheless, the concatenation of events and the causal effi-
ciency of the characters involved appear to operate just as rigidly as
in a traditional dramatic structure, it is because they are responding
to an order, of prophecy (or perhaps one should say of Kirke-
gaardian "repetition") that is as different from fatality as causality
is from analogy.

The pattern of the film's unfolding is not that of tragedy in the
usual sense, rather in the sense of the medieval Passion Play, or

134

The Stylistks of Robert Bresson

better still, of the Way of the Cross, each sequence being a station
along that road. We are given the key to this by the dialogue in the
hut between the two cures, when the one from Ambricourt reveals
that he is spiritually attracted to the Mount of Olives. "Is it not
enough that Our Lord should have granted me the grace of letting
me know today, through the words of my old teacher, that nothing,
throughout all eternity, can remove me from the place chosen by
me from all eternity, that I was the prisoner of His Sacred Passion?"

Death is not the preordained end of our final agony, only its
conclusion and a deliverance. Henceforth we shall know to what
divine ordinance, to what spiritual rhythm the sufferings and ac-
tions of the cure respond. They are the outward representation of
his agony. At which point we should indicate the analogies with
Christ that abound towards the end of the film, or they may very
well go unnoticed. For example, the two fainting fits during the
night; the fall in the mud; the vomitings of wine and blood — a
remarkable synthesis of powerful comparisons with the falls of
Jesus, the Blood of the Passion, the sponge with vinegar on it, and
the defiling spittle. These are not all. For the veil of Veronica we
have the cloth of Seraphita; then finally the death in the attic — a
Golgotha with even a good and a bad thief.

Now let us immediately put aside these comparisons, the very
enumeration of which is necessarily deceptive. Their aesthetic
weight derives from their theological value, but both defy explana-
tion. Bresson like Bernanos avoids any sort of symbolic allusion and
so none of the situations, despite their obvious parallel to the
Gospel, is created precisely because of that parallel. Each carries its
own biographical and individual meaning. Its Christlike resem-
blance comes second, through being projected onto the higher
plane of analogy. In no sense is it true to say that the life of the
cure of Ambricourt is an imitation of its divine model, rather it is a
repetition and a picturing forth of that life. Each bears his own
cross and each cross is different, but all are the Cross of the Passion.
The sweat on the brow of the cure is a bloody sweat.

135

So, probably for the first time, the cinema gives us a film in
which the only genuine incidents, the only perceptible movements
are those of the life of the spirit. Not only that, it also offers us a
new dramatic form, that is specifically religious — or better still,
specifically theological; a phenomenology of salvation and grace.

It is worth noting that through playing down the psychological
elements and keeping the dramatics to a minimum, Bresson is left
to face two kinds of pure reality. On the one hand, as we saw, we
have the countenance of the actor denuded of all symbolic ex-
pression, sheer epidermis, set in a surrounding devoid of any art-
flee. On the other hand there is what we must call the "written
reality." Indeed, Bresson's faithfulness to the text of Beraanos, his
refusal, that is, not only to adapt it but also his paradoxical concern
to emphasize its literary character, is part of the same predeter-
mined approach to the direction of his actors and the selection of
his settings. Bresson treats the novel as he does his characters. The
novel is a cold, hard fact, a reality to be accepted as it stands. One
must not attempt to adapt it to the situation in hand, or manipulate
it to fit some passing need for an explanation; on the contrary it is
something to be taken absolutely as it stands. Bresson never
condense? the text, he cuts it. Thuswhat is left over is a part of the
original. Like marble from a quarry the words of the film continue
to be part of the novel. Of course the deliberate emphasis on their
literary character can be interpreted as a search after artistic
stylization, which is the very opposite of realism. The fact is, how-
ever, that in this case the reality is not the descriptive content,
moral or intellectual, of the text — it is the very text itself, or more
properly, the style. Clearly the reality at one stage removed of the
novel and that which the camera captures directly, cannot fit or
grow together or become one. On the contrary the effect of their
juxtaposition is to reaffirm their differences. Each plays its part, side
by side, using the means at its disposal, in its own setting and after
its own style. But it is doubtless by this separating off of elements

136

The Stylistics of Robert Bresson

which because of their resemblance would appear to belong to-
gether, that Bresson manages to eliminate what is accidental. The
ontological conflict between two orders of events, occurring simul-
taneously;, when confronted on the screen reveal their single com-
mon measure — the soul.

Each actor says the same things and the very disparity between
their expressions, the substance of what they say, their style, the
kind of indifference which seems to govern the relation of actor to
text, of word and visage, is the surest guarantee of their close com-
plicity. This language which no lips could speak is, of necessity,
from the soul.

It is unlikely that there exists anywhere in the whole of French
cinema, perhaps even in all French literature, many moments of a
more intense beauty than in the medaliion scene between the cure
and the countess. Its beauty does not derive from the acting nor
from the psychological and dramatic values of the dialogue, nor
indeed from its intrinsic meaning. The true dialogue that punctu-
ates the struggle between the inspired priest and a soul in despair
is, of its very nature, ineffable. The decisive clashes of their spiritual
fencing-match escape us. Their words announce, or prepare the
way for, the fiery touch of grace. There is nothing here then of the
flow of words that usually goes with a conversion, while the over-
powering severity of the dialogue, its rising tension and its final
calm leave us with the conviction that we have been the privileged
witnesses of a supernatural storm. The words themselves are so
much dead weight, the echo of a silence that is the true dialogue
between these two souls; a hint at their secret; the opposite side of
the coin, if one dare to say so, of the Divine Countenance. When
later the cure refuses to come to his own defense by producing the
countess' letter, it is not out of humility or love of suffering. It is
rather because no tangible evidence is worthy to play a part either
in his defense or his indictment. Of its nature the evidence of the
countess is no more acceptable than that of de Chantal, and none
has the right to ask God to bear witness.

137

The technique of Bresson's direction cannot adequately be
judged except at the level of his aesthetic intention. Inadequately as
we may have so far described the latter, it may yet be that the
highly astonishing paradox of the film is now a little more evident.
Actually the distinction of having set text over against image for the
first time goes to Melville in his Silence de la mer. It is noteworthy
that his reason was likewise a desire for fidelity. However, the
structure of Vercors' book was of itself unusual. In his Journal
Bresson has done more than justify Melville's experiment and
shown how well warranted it was. He has carried it to its final
conclusions.

Is Le Journal just a silent film with spoken titles? The spoken
word, as we have seen, does not enter into the image as a realistic
component. Even when spoken by one of the characters, it rather
resembles the recitative of an opera. At first sight the film seems to
be somehow made up on the one hand of the abbreviated text of
the novel and illustrated, on the other hand, by images that never
pretend to replace it. All that is spoken is not seen, yet nothing that
is seen but is also spoken. At worst, critical good sense can reproach
Bresson with having substituted an illustrated radiophonic mon-
tage, no less, for Bernanos' novel.

So it is from this ostensible corruption of the art of cinema that
we begin if we are to grasp fully Bresson's originality and boldness.

In the first place, if Bresson "returns" to the silent film it is
certainly not, despite the abundance of close-ups, because he wants
to tie in again with theatrical expressionism — that fruit of an
infirmity — on the contrary, it is in order to rediscover the dignity of
the human countenance as understood by Stroheim and Dreyer.
Now if there is one and only one quality of the silent film irreconcil-
able of its very nature with sound, it is the syntactical subtlety of
montage and expression in the playing of the film, that is to say that
which proceeds in effect from the weakness of the silent film. But
not all silent films want to be such. Nostalgia for a silence that
would be the benign procreator of a visual symbolism unduly con-

138

The Stylistics oj Robert Bresson

fuses the so-called primacy of the image with the true vocation of
the cinema — which is the primacy of the object. The absence of a
sound track for Greed, Nosferatu, or La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc
means something quite other than the silence of Caligari, Die
Nibelungen, or Eldorado. It is a frustration not the foundation of a
form of expression. The former films exist in spite of their silence
not because of it. In this sense the invention of the sound track is
just a fortuitous scientific phenomenon and not the aesthetic revolu-
tion people always say it is. The language of film, like the language
of Aesop, is ambiguous and in spite of appearances to the contrary,
the history of cinema before and after 1928 is an unbroken continu-
ity. It is the story of the relations between expressionism and real-
ism. Sound was to destroy expressionism for a while before adopt-
ing it in its turn. On the other hand, it became an immediate part of
the continued development of realism.

Paradoxically enough it is to the most theatrical, that is to say to
the most talkative, forms of the sound film that we must look today
for a resurgence of the old symbolism while the pre-talkie realism
of a Stroheim has in fact no following. Yet, it is evident that
Bresson's undertaking is somehow related to the work of Stroheim
and Renoir. The separating of sound and of the image to which it
relates cannot be understood without a searching examination of
the aesthetics of realism in sound. It is just as mistaken to see it as
an illustration of a text, as a commentary on an image. Their par-
allelism maintains that division which is present to our senses. It
continues the Bressonian dialectic between abstraction and reality
thanks to which we are concerned with a single reality — that of
human souls. In no sense does Bresson return to the expressionism
of the silent film. On the one hand he excludes one of the com-
ponents of reality in order to reproduce it, deliberately stylized on a
sound track, partially independent of the image. In other words, it
is as if the final rerecording was composed of sound directly re-
corded with scrupulous fidelity and a text postsynchronized on a
monotone. But, as we have pointed out, this text is itself a second

139

reality, a "cold aesthetic fact." Its realism Is its style, while the style
of the image is primarily its reality, and the style of the film is
precisely the conflict between the two.

Bresson disposes once and for all of that commonplace of criti-
cism according to which image and sound should never duplicate
one another. The most moving moments in the film are those in
which text and image are saying the same thing, each however in
its own way. The sound never serves simply to fill out what we see. It
strengthens it and multiplies it just as the echo chamber of a violin
echoes and multiplies the vibrations of the strings. Yet this meta-
phor is diaketically inadequate since it is not so much a resonance
that the mind perceives as something that does not match, as when
a color is not properly superimposed on a drawing. It is here at the
edge that the event reveals its true significance It is because the
film is entirely structured on this relationship that, towards the end,
the images take on such emotional power. It would be in vain to
look for its devastating beauty simply in what is explicit. I doubt if
the individual frames in any other film, taken separately, are so
deceptive. Their frequent lack of plastic composition, the awkward-
ness and static quality of the actors completely mislead one as to
their value in the overall film. Moreover, this accretion of effective-
ness is not due to the editing. The value of an image does not
depend on what precedes or follows it. They accumulate, rather, a
static energy, like the parallel leaves of a condenser. Between this
and the sound track differences of aesthetic potential are set up, the
tension of which becomes unbearable. Thus the image-text relation-
ship moves towards its climax, the latter having the advantage.
Thus it is that, quite naturally, at the command of an imperious
logic, there is nothing more that the image has to communicate
except by disappearing. The spectator has been led, step by step,
towards that night of the senses the only expression of which is a
light on a blank screen.

That is where the so-called silent film and its lofty realism is
headed, to the disappearance of the image and its replacement

140

The Stylistics of Robert Bresson

simply by the text of the novel. But here we are experimenting with
an irrefutable aesthetic, with a sublime achievement of pure
cinema. Just as the blank page of Mallarme and the silence of
Rimbaud is language at the highest state, the screen, free of images
and handed back to literature, is the triumph of cinematographic
realism. The black cross on the white screen, as awkwardly drawn
as on the average memorial card, the only trace left by the "assump-
tion" of the image, is a witness to something the reality of which is
itself but a sign.

With Le Journal cinematographic adaptation reaches a new
stage. Up to now, film tended to substitute for the novel in the
guise of its aesthetic translation into another language. Fidelity
meant respect for the spirit of the novel, but it also meant a search
for necessary equivalents, that is to say, it meant taking into ac-
count the dramatic requirements of the theater or again the more
direct effectiveness of the cinematographic image. Unfortunately,
concern for these things will continue to be the general rule. We
must remember however that it was through their application that
Le Diable au corps and La Symphonie pastorale turned out so well.
According to the best opinions, films like these are as good as the
books on which they are modelled.

In the margin of this formula we might also note the existence
of the free adaptation of books such as that made by Renoir for
Une Partie de campagne or Madame B ovary. Here the problem is
solved in another way. The original is just a source of inspiration.
Fidelity is here the temperamental affinity between film-maker and
novelist, a deeply sympathetic understanding. Instead of presenting
itself as a substitute, the film is intended to take its place alongside
the book — to make a pair with it, like twin stars. This assumption,
applicable only where there is genius, does not exclude the possibil-
ity that the film is a greater achievement than its literary model, as
in the case of Renoir's The River.

Le Journal however is something else again. Its dialectic be-

141

What Is Cinema?

tween fidelity and creation is reducible, in the last analysis, to a
dialectic between the cinema and literature. There is no question
here of a translation, no matter how faithful or intelligent. Still less
is it a question of free inspiration with the intention of making a
duplicate. It is a question of building a secondary work with the
novel as foundation. In no sense is the film "comparable" to the
novel or "worthy" of it. It is a new aesthetic creation, the novel so to
speak multiplied by the cinema.

The only procedure in any way comparable of which we have
any examples are films of paintings. Emmer or Alain Resnais are
similarly faithful to the original, their raw material is the already
highly developed work of the painter; the reality with which they
are concerned is not the subject of the painting but the painting
itself, in the same way as the text of the novel is Bresson's reality.
But the fidelity of Alain Resnais to Van Gogh is but the prior
condition of a symbiosis of cinema and painting. That is why, as a
rule, painters fail utterly to understand the whole procedure. If you
see these films as nothing more than an intelligent, effective, and
even a valuable means of popularizing painting — they certainly are
that too — you know nothing of their aesthetic biology.

This comparison with films of paintings, however, is only partially
valid since these are confined from the outset to the realm of minor
aesthetic works. They add something to the paintings, they prolong
their existence, they release them from the confines of their frames
but they can never pretend to be the paintings themselves.* The
Van Gogh of Alain Resnais is a minor masterpiece taken from a
major work which it makes use of and explains in detail but does
not replace. There are two reasons for this congenital limitation.
First of all, the photographic reproduction, in projection, cannot
pretend to be a substitute for the original or to share its identity. If
it could, then it would be the better to destroy its aesthetic auton-
omy, since films of paintings start off precisely as the negation of

* At least up to the time of Le Mystire Picasso which, as we shall see,
may invalidate this criticism.

142

w

The Stylistics of Robert Bresson

that on which this aesthetic autonomy is based, the fact that the
paintings are circumscribed in space and exist outside time. It is
because cinema as the art of space and time is the contrary of
painting that it has something to add to it.

Such a contradiction does not exist between the novel and the
film. Not only are they both narrative arts, that is to say temporal
arts, but it is not even possible to maintain a priori that the cine-
matic image is essentially inferior to the image prompted by the
written word. In all probability the opposite is the case. But this is
not where the problem lies. It is enough if the novelist, like the film-
maker, is concerned with the idea of unfolding a real world. Once
we accept these essential resemblances, there is nothing absurd in
trying to write a novel on film. But Le Journal has just proved to us
that it is more fruitful to speculate on their differences rather than
on their resemblances, that is, for the existence of the novel to be
affirmed by the film and not dissolved into it. It is hardly enough to
say of this work, once removed, that it is in essence faithful to the
original because, to begin with, it is the novel. But most of all the
resulting work is not, certainly, better (that kind of judgment is
meaningless . . .) but "more" than the book. The aesthetic plea-
sure we derive from Bresson's film, while the acknowledgment for it
goes, essentially, to the genius of Bernanos, includes all that the
novel has to offer plus, in addition, its refraction in the cinema.

After Bresson, Aurenche and Bost are but the Viollet-le-Duc of
cinematographic adaptation.

143

CHARLIE CHAPLIN

Charlie is a Mythical Character

Charlie is a mythical figure who rises above every adventure in
which he becomes involved. For the general public, Charlie exists
as a person before and after Easy Street and The Pilgrim. For
hundreds of millions of people on this planet he is a hero like
Ulysses or Roland in other civilizations — but with the difference
that we know the heroes of old through literary works that are
complete and have defined once and for all, their adventures and
their various manifestations. Charlie, on the other hand, is always
free to appear in another film. The living Charlie remains the cre-
ator and guarantor of Charlie the character.

But What Makes Charlie Run?

But the continuity and coherence of Charlie's aesthetic existence
can only be experienced by way of the films that he inhabits. The
public recognizes him from his face and especially from his little
trapezoidal moustache and his duck-like waddle rather than from
his dress which, here again, does not make the monk. In The Pil-

144

Charlie Chaplin

grim we see him dressed only as a convict and as a clergyman and
in a lot of films he wears a tuxedo or the elegant cutaway coat of a
millionaire. These physical "markings" would be of less than no
importance if one did not perceive, more importantly, the interior
constants that are the true constituents of the character. These are
however less easy to define or describe. One way would be to
examine his reaction to a particular event, for example his complete
absence of obstinacy when the world offers too strong an opposi-
tion. In such cases he tries to get round the problem rather than
solve it. A temporary way out is enough for him, just as if for him
there was no such thing as the future. For example in The Pilgrim
he props a rolling-pin on a shelf with a bottle of milk that he is
going to need in a minute or two. Of course the rolling-pin falls
onto his head. While a provisional solution always seems to satisfy
him he shows a fabulous ingenuity in the immediate circumstance.
He is never at a loss in any situation. There is a solution for every-
thing even though the world (and especially things in it rather than
the people) is not made for him.

Charlie and Things

The utilitarian function of things relates to a human order of things
itself utilitarian and which in turn has an eye to the future. In our
world, things are tools, some more some less efficient, but all di-
rected towards a specific purpose. However, they do not serve
Charlie as they serve us. Just as human society never accepts him
even provisionally except as a result of a misunderstanding, every
time that Charlie wants to use something for the purpose for which
it was made, that is to say, within the framework of our society,
either he goes about it in an extremely awkward fashion (especially
at table) or the things themselves refuse to be used, almost it would
seem deliberately. In A Day's Pleasure the engine of the old Ford

145

What Is Cinema?

stops every time he opens the door. In One AM. his bed moves
around unpredictably so that he cannot lie down, In The Pawnshop
the works of the alarm clock that he had just taken to pieces start
moving around on their own like worms. But, conversely, things
which refuse to serve him the way they serve us are in fact used by
him to much better purpose because he puts them to multifarious
uses according to his need at the moment.

The street lamp in Easy Street serves the function of an
anaesthetist's mask to asphyxiate the terror of the neighborhood. A
little later a cast-iron stove is used to knock the man flat, whereas
the "functional" truncheon only gives him a slight singing in the
ears. In The Adventurer a blind transforms him into a lampstand,
invisible to the police. In Sunnyside a shirt serves as a tablecloth, as
sleeves, as a towel, and so on. It looks as if things are only willing to
be of use to him in ways that are purely marginal to the uses
assigned by society. The most beautiful example of these strange
uses is the famous dance of the rolls which contribute to a sudden
outburst of highly unusual choreography.

Let us look at another characteristic gag. In The Adventurer
Charlie thinks he has disposed of the warders pursuing him, by
pelting them with stones from the top of a cliff. The warders are
actually lying on the ground more or less unconscious. Instead of
seizing the opportunity to put daylight between himself and them,
he amuses himself by throwing more stones, pebbles this time, by
way of refining on the operation. While he is doing this he fails to
notice that another warder has arrived behind him and is watching
him. As he reaches for another stone his hand touches the warden's
shoe. His reaction is something to marvel at. Instead of trying to
run away, which would in any case be useless, or having sized up
his desperate plight, handing himself over to the officer, Charlie
covers the ill-met shoe with a handful of dust. You laugh and your
neighbor laughs too. At first it is all the same laughter. But I have
"listened in" to this gag twenty times in different theaters. When
the audience, or at least part of it, was made up of intellectuals,
students for example, there was a second wave of laughter of a

146

Charlie Chaplin

different kind. At that moment the hall was no longer filled with the
original laughter but with a series of echoes, a second wave of
laughter, reflected off the minds of the spectators as if from the
invisible walls of an abyss. These echoed effects are not always
audible; first of all they depend on the audience but most of all
because Charlie's gags are often of such short duration that they
allow just enough time for you to "get it," nor are they followed by
a time lag that gives you a chance to think about them. It is the
opposite of the technique called for in the theater by the laughter
from the house. Although he was brought up in the school of the
music hall, Charlie has refined down its comedy, refusing in any
way to pander to the public. This need for simplicity and effective-
ness requires of the gag the greatest elliptical clarity, and once he
has achieved this he refuses to elaborate on it.

The technique of Charlie's gags naturally calls for a study to
itself, which we cannot undertake here. Sufficient perhaps that we
have made it clear that they have attained a kind of final perfec-
tion, the highest degree of style. It is stupid to treat Charlie as a
clown of genius. If there had never been a cinema he would un-
doubtedly have been a clown of genius, but the cinema has allowed
him to raise the comedy of circus and music hall to the highest
aesthetic level. Chaplin needed the medium of the cinema to free
comedy completely from the limits of space and time imposed by
the stage or the circus arena.

Thanks to the camera, the evolution of the comic effect which is
being presented, all the while with the greatest clarity, not only
does not need boosting so that a whole audience can enjoy it, on
the contrary it can now be refined down to the utmost degree; thus
the machinery is kept to a minimum, so that it becomes a high-
precision mechanism capable of responding instantly to the most
delicate of springs.

It is significant, furthermore, that the best Chaplin films can be
seen over and over again with no loss of pleasure — indeed the very
opposite is the case. It is doubtless a fact that the satisfaction de-
rived from certain gap is inexhaustible, so deep does it lie, but it is

147

What Is Cinema?

furthermore supremely true that comic form and aesthetic value
owe nothing to surprise. The latter is exhausted the first time
around and is replaced by a much more subtle pleasure, namely the
delight of anticipating and recognizing perfection.

Charlie and Time

Whatever the facts, one can clearly see that the gag referred to
above opens up under the initial comic shock a spiritual abyss
which induces in the spectator, without giving him a chance to
analyze it, that delicious vertigo that quickly modifies the tone of
the laughter it provokes. The reason is that Charlie carries to ab-
surd lengths his basic principle of never going beyond the actual
moment. Having got rid of his two wardens, thanks to his capacity
to exploit the terrain and whatever objects are to hand, once the
danger is past he immediately stops thinking about building up a
reserve store of supplementary prudence. The consequence is not
long delayed. But this time it is so serious that Charlie is not able to
find an immediate solution — rest assured that he soon will — he can-
not go beyond a reflex action and the pretence at improvisation.
One second, just time enough for a gesture of dismissal and the
threat, in illusion, will have been effaced by the derisory stroke of
an eraser. Let no one, however, stupidly confuse Charlie's gesture
with that of an ostrich burying its head in the sand. The whole
bearing of Charlie refutes this; it is sheer improvisation, unlimited
imagination in the face of danger. The swiftness of the threat,
however, and above all its brutal nature in contrast to the euphori-
ous condition of the mind in which it takes conscious shape, does
not allow him, this time, to escape immediately. Besides who can
tell — because of the surprise it gives to the warden who was expect-
ing a gesture of fear — if his action will not in the end allow him
that fraction of a second that he needs to make his escape? Instead

148

Charlie Chaplin

of solving the problem Charlie has no recourse other than to pre-
tend things are not what they seem.

As a matter of fact this gesture of brushing aside danger is one
of a number of gags peculiar to Charlie. Among these should be
included the celebrated occasion when he camouflages himself as a
tree in Shoulder Arms. "Camouflage" is not really the right term. It
is more properly a form of mimicry. One might go so far as to say
that the defense reflexes of Charlie end in a reabsorption of time by
space. Driven into a corner by a terrible and unavoidable danger,
Charlie hides behind appearances like a crab burying itself in the
sand. And this is no mere metaphor. At the opening of The Adven-
turer we see the convict emerging from the sand in which he was
hiding, and burying himself again when danger returns.

The painted canvas tree in which Charlie is hiding blends in
with the trees of the forest in a way that is quite "hallucinating."
One is reminded of those little stick-like insects that are indiscerni-
ble in a clump of twigs or those little Indian insects that can take on
the appearance of leaves, even leaves that caterpillars have nibbled.
The sudden vegetable-like immobility of Charlie-the-tree is like an
insect playing dead, as is his other gag in The Adventurer when he
pretends to have been killed by a shot from a warden's gun. But
what distinguishes Charlie from the insect is the speed with which
he returns from his condition of spatial dissolution into the cosmos,
to a state of instant readiness for action. Thus, motionless inside his
tree he flattens out, one after the other, with swift precise move-
ments of his "branches," a file of German soldiers as they come
within range.

The Swift Kick Characterizes the Man

It is with a simple and yet sublime gesture that Charlie expresses his
supreme detachment from that biographical and social world in

149

which we are plunged and which, for us, is a cause for regret and
uneasiness, namely that remarkable backward kick which he em-
ploys to dispose alike of a banana peel, the head of Goliath and,
more ideally still, of every bothersome thought. It is significant that
Charlie never kicks straight ahead. Even when he kicks his partners
in the pants he manages to do it while looking the other way. A
cobbler would explain that this was because of the points of his
outsize shoes. However, perhaps I may be allowed to ignore this
piece of superficial realism and to see in the style and frequent and
very personal use of this backward kick the reflection of a very vital
approach to things. On the other hand, Charlie never liked, if I may
dare to say so, to approach a problem head on. He prefers to take it
by surprise with his back turned. On the other hand, especially
when it seems to have no precise purpose, a simple gesture of
revenge for example, this back-kick is a perfect expression of his
constant determination not to be attached to the past, not to drag
anything along behind him. This admirable gesture is furthermore
capable of a thousand nuances ranging all the way from peevish
revenge to a gay "I'm free at last," except, that is to say, when he is
not shaking off an invisible thread attached to his leg.

The Sin of Repetition

His use of the mechanical is the price he is forced to pay for his
nonadherence to the normal sequence of events and to the function
of things. Since for him things have no future in the sense of being
planned to serve an end, when Charlie is involved with an object
for some time he quickly contracts a sort of mechanical cramp, a
surface condition in which the original reason for what he is doing
is forgotten. This unfortunate inclination always serves him well. It
is the basis for the famous gag in Modern Times when Charlie,
working on the assembly line, continues spasmodically to tighten

150

Charlie Chaplin

imaginary bolts; in Easy Street, we observe it in a more subtle form.
When the big tough is chasing him round the room Charlie shoves
the bed between them. There then follows a series of feints in the
course of which each moves up and down his side of the bed. After
a while, in spite of the continued danger, Charlie becomes used to
this temporary defense tactic, and instead of continuing to direct
his movements by the movements of his adversary, ends by running
up and down on his own side as if the gesture were sufficient of
itself to ward off all danger forever. Naturally, no matter how stu-
pid the other man might be, all he has to do is to switch rhythm, to
have Charlie run right into his arms. I am confident that in all
Charlie's pictures there is not one where this mechanical movement
does not end badly for him. In other words, mechanization of
movement is in a sense Charlie's original sin, the ceaseless tempta-
tion. His independence of things and events can only be projected
in time in the shape of something mechanical, like a force of inertia
which continues under its initial impetus. The activity of a social
being, such as you or I, is planned with foresight and as it develops,
its direction is checked by constant reference to the reality that it is
concerned to shape. It adheres throughout to the evolution of the
event of which it is becoming part. Charlie's activity on the con-
trary is composed of a succession of separate instants sufficient to
each of which is the evil thereof. Then laziness supervenes and
Charlie continues thereafter to offer the solution proper to a previ-
ous and specific moment. The capital sin of Charlie, and he does
not hesitate to make us laugh about it at his own expense, is to
project into time a mode of being that is suited to one instant, and
that is what is meant by "repetition."

I think we should also include in this sin of repetition the cate-
gory of well-known gags in which we see a joyous Charlie brought to
order by reality, for example the famous gag in Modern Times
when he wants to bathe and dives into a river that is little more
than a foot deep or again, at the beginning of Easy Street when,
converted by love, he walks out of a room and falls on his face on

151

What Is Cinema?

the stairway. Subject to a more precise check, I would be willing
to suggest that every time Charlie makes us laugh at his own expense
and not at that of other people, it is when he has been imprudent
enough, one way or another, to presume that the future will resemble
the past or to join naively in the game as played by society and to
have faith in its elaborate machinery for buildng the future ... its
moral, religious, social and political machinery.

A Man beyond the Realm of the Sacred

One of the most characteristic aspects of Charlie's freedom in re-
spect to the demands of society is his total indifference to the
category of things held sacred. Naturally by sacred I here mean,
first of all, the various social aspects of the religious life. Charlie's
old films add up to the most formidable anticlerical indictment
imaginable of provincial puritan society in the United States. One
has only to recall The Pilgrim and the incredible faces of those
deacons, sacristans, and sharp-featured, toothy, bigoted females,
the solemn and angular Quakers. The world of Dubout is a world
of child's play alongside this social caricature worthy of Daumier.
But the principal strength of this portrait derives from the fact that
the acid which has etched this engraving is in no sense anticlerical-
ism. It is rather what ought to be called a radical a-clericism, and
this keeps the film within the bounds of what is acceptable. There is
no sacrilegious intent. No clergyman could take offense at Charlie's
outfit. But there is something worse here, namely a sort of nullify-
ing of whatever justification there is for such people, their beliefs
and their behavior. Charlie has absolutely nothing against them. He
can even pretend to go through the Sunday ritual, to pantomime
the sermon for their pleasure or to remove the suspicions of the
police. It is almost as if he had introduced a Negro dance into the
ritual. In one blow, ritual and faithful are relegated to a world of

152

Charlie Chaplin

the absurd, reduced to the condition of ridiculous, even of obscene
objects, by being deprived of all meaning. By way of a derisory
paradox the only actions throughout the ceremony that make any
sense are in fact Charlie's gestures when he tests the weight of the
collection-bag, rewarding the generous with a smile and the mean
with a frown. Another example is the way he returns several times
after his sermon to bow to his audience like a contented vaudeville
actor. Nor is it a matter of chance that the one spectator who enters
into the game and applauds is a snotty-nosed urchin who has spent
the entire service, in spite of his mother's remonstrances, fly-
watching.

However, there are other rituals besides the religious. Society
approves a thousand forms of acceptable behavior which are a sort
of permanent liturgy that it performs in its own honor. This is
particularly true of table manners. Charlie never really manages to
master the use of his knife and fork. He regularly gets his elbow
among the plates, spills his soup on his pants and so on. The high
spot surely is when he is himself a waiter, as in The Rink. Religious
or not, the sacred is everywhere present in the life of society and
not only in the magistrate, the policeman, the priest, but in the
ritual associated with eating, with professional relations, and public
transportation. It is the way that society retains its cohesion as if
within a magnetic field. Unknowingly, every minute of our time we
adjust to this framework. But Charlie is of another metal. Not only
does he elude its grasp, but the very category of the sacred does not
exist for him. Such a thing is, to him, as inconceivable as the color
of a pink geranium is to someone born blind.

To put it more precisely, a good part of Charlie's comedy is
born of the efforts he makes (to fit the needs of a temporary situa-
tion) to imitate us, as for example when he forces himself to eat
politely, even with delicacy, or when he adds a touch of derisive
coquetry to his dress.

153

CINEMA AND EXPLORATION

in his little book Le Cinema au long cows (Filming in Far-Off
Lands), Jean Thevenot has traced the development of the film of
exploration from its successful beginnings, around 1928, through
the period of its decline, between 1930 and 1940, to its rebirth
following World War II. The implications of this evolution are
worth studying.

It was after World War I, that is to say in 1920, some ten years
after it was filmed by Ponting during the heroic expedition of Scott
to the South Pole, that With Scott to the South Pole revealed to the
film-going public those polar landscapes which were to constitute
the major success of a series of films of which Flaherty's Nanook
(1922) is still the outstanding example. Not long afterwards, very
likely because of the success of the Arctic films, a type of produc-
tion appeared which we might categorize as "tropical and equa-
torial," The best known are those filmed in Africa, and in particular
La Croisiere Noire by Leon Poirier, Cimbo, and Congorilla — the
first dating from 1926, and the last two filmed between 1923 and
1927, but only shown publicly in 1928. In these first travel-films-in-
the-grand-manner we already see what are the chief values of this
category: an authentically poetic quality which does not age and is
admirably exemplified in Nanook. But this poetry, especially in

154

Cinema and Exploration

those films shot in the South Seas, began to take on an exotic
quality. From Moana, virtually an ethnographic document, to
Tabu, by way of White Shadows, we are aware of the gradual
formation of a mythology. We see the Western mind as it were
taking over a far-off civilization and interpreting it after its own
fashion.

In French literature those were the days of Paul Morand, of
Mac Orlan, and of Blaise Cendrars. The new mystique of the ex-
otic, given a new life by the new media of communication, and
which one might reasonably call "instant exoticism," was most typi-
cally expressed in a film made in the early days of sound. It flung
the whole earth onto the screen in a jigsaw of visual images and
sounds and was entitled Melodie der Welt. Made by Walther Rutt-
mann, it was one of the initial successes of a new art form.

Thenceforward, with a few outstanding exceptions, the exotic
film went into a decline characterized by a shameless search after
the spectacular and the sensational. It was not enough merely to
hunt the lion, the lion must first gobble up the bearers. In L'Ajrique
vous parte a Negro gets eaten by a crocodile. In Trader Horn
another Negro is charged by a rhinoceros. On this occasion the
chase appeared to be staged, but the same intention was clearly
there. Thus there came into existence the myth of an Africa inhab-
ited by savages and wild beasts, the culmination of which was
Tarzan and King Solomon's Mines.

Since World War II we have witnessed a definite return to
documentary authenticity. The cycle of exoticism reached its climax
in absurdity. Today the public demands that what it sees shall be
believable, a faith that can be tested by the other media of informa-
tion, namely, radio, books, and the daily press.

The rebirth of the film of exploration is basically due to a re-
newed interest in exploration, the mystique of which may very well
turn out to be something quite other than the old exoticism as may
be seen for example in Rendezvous de juillet.

It is this new point of departure which gives to the present

155

What Is Cinema?

expeditions their style and their direction. These derive in the first
place from the character of today's exploration which is for the
most part either scientific or anthropological. While sensationalism
is not absolutely excluded it is nevertheless subordinated to the
objectively documentary purpose of the expedition. The result is
that the sensational is virtually eliminated, for it is rarely possible,
as we shall see, for the camera to be a witness to the most danger-
ous moments of an expedition. By way of compensation, the psy-
chological and human elements move into the foreground. There
are two occasions when this is particularly true. The first is when
the behavior of the members of the expedition and their reactions
to the task in hand constitute a kind of anthropology of an explorer,
the experimental psychology as it were of an adventurer. The sec-
ond is when the people under study are no longer treated as a
species of exotic animal, and who perforce must be fully described
so that they may be better understood.

Furthermore the film is no longer the only, nor even probably
the principal instrument for bringing the realities of the expedition
before the public. Today it is usually accompanied by a book or
shown during a series of lectures, first at the Salle Pleyel, then in a
few scattered cities throughout France. These will be followed by
radio and television versions. And all of this for the very good
reason that, economics aside, a film cannot cover every aim of an
expedition, not even its principal material aspects. Besides, this type
of film is conceived as an illustrated lecture, where the presence and
the words of the speaker-witness constantly complement and au-
thenticate the image on the screen.

At which point let me cite a film that runs counter to this evolu-
tionary trend and furthermore is proof enough that the docu-
mentary-film-by-reconstruction is dead. The film in question is an
English Technicolor film, Scott of the Antarctic, the French title of
which is L' A venture sans retour, which retells the story of the expe-
dition of Captain Scott in 1911 and 1912. It is ostensibly the very
expedition shown in With Scott to the South Pole.

156

Cinema and Exploration

Let us first recall the heroic and moving character of this under-
taking. Scott set out to conquer the South Pole with revolutionary
but as yet experimental equipment; a few "caterpillars," some
ponies, and dogs. The machines were the first to let him down.
Then by degrees the ponies died of exhaustion. By now there were
not enough dogs to serve the needs of the expedition and the five
men on the final stage from their last camp to the Pole were obliged
to pull their own supply sledges, a round trip estimated at approxi-
mately 1250 miles. They reached their objective only to find that
Amundsen had planted the Norwegian flag there a few hours be-
fore. The return trip was one long agony; the last three survivors,
the oil for their lamps exhausted, froze to death in their tents. Three
months later, their comrades from the base camp found them and
were able to reconstruct their Odyssey, thanks to a diary kept by
the leader and to some exposed photographic plates.

This undertaking of Captain Scott marks perhaps the first, albeit
unfortunate, attempt at a modern scientific expedition. Scott failed
where Amundsen succeeded because he tried to do something out-
side the established and well-tried techniques of a polar expedition.
Nevertheless his unfortunate "caterpillars" are the forerunners of
the "Weasels" used by Paul-Emile Victor and Liotard. It also pro-
vides the first example of a practice which is now common, namely,
the provision for a cinematic report as an integral part of the expe-
dition itself. Their cameraman, Ponting, whose film was the first
ever to be made of a Polar expedition, had his hands frostbitten
while reloading without gloves in a temperature of — 30°C. While
Ponting did not accompany Scott on the long trek to the pole, his
film of the voyage south, of the preparations for the expedition, of
life at the base camp, and of the tragic ending of the expedition
remain at once a moving testimony to the adventure, and the arche-
type of all films of this genre.

England is understandably proud of Captain Scott and would
naturally want to pay tribute to him. Yet, for my part I have never
seen a more boring and ridiculous undertaking than Scott of the

157

Antarctic. Here is a film so lavishly and carefully made that it must
have cost as much as the original expedition. Considering the time
at which it was made, 1947-1948, it is also a Technicolor master-
piece. The studio reconstructions reveal a mastery of trick work and
studio imitation — but to what purpose? . To imitate the inimitable,
to reconstruct that which of its very nature can only occur once,
namely risk, adventure, death. Certainly the scenario is no help.
Scott's life and death are told with an almost pedantic formality. I
will not dwell on the moral of the story, which is nothing but a Boy
Scout moral raised to the dignity of a national institution. The real
failure of the film does not lie there, but in its out-of-date tech-
nique, and for two reasons.

First of all the film takes no account of the scientific information
concerning polar exploration which the man in the street now has
at his command. He derives this competence from newspaper re-
ports, from radio, television, and cinema. To draw a parallel in
educational terms, one might say of this film that it offers scientific
information on a grammar-school level to high-school graduates.
This is unfortunate, when the aim is an educational one. Admittedly
Scott's expedition was indeed one rather of exploration, its scientific
aspect being little more than tentative, and as it turned out, un-
successful. For this very reason the producers should have been
concerned to explain at greater length the psychological context of
the adventure. To anyone seeing Greenland by Marcel Ichac and
Languepin at the cinema across the way, Scott would appear an
obstinate fool. Admittedly the director, Charles Frend, took pains
in a number of unfortunately heavily didactic scenes to describe the
social, moral, and technical surroundings out of which the expedi-
tion was born, but he does so for an England of 1910. What he
should have done by way of some storytelling device or other was
to draw a parallel with our own times, because this is what the
audience will instinctively do. Secondly, and this most importantly,
the prevalence of objective reporting following World War II de-
fined once and for all what it is that we require from such reports.

158

Cinema and Exploration

Exoticism with all its romantic and spectacular seduction has given
way to a taste for the critical handling of the facts for their own
sake. Ponting's film of the expedition is ancestor to both Kon Tiki
and Greenland, that is to say to the shortcomings of the one and to
the determination to make an exhaustive report evident in the
other.

The simple snapshot of Scott and his four companions at the
pole, which was discovered in their baggage, is far more stirring
than the entire Technicolor feature by Charles Frend.

The extent to which his film is a pointless undertaking is even
more evident when one discovers that it was made among the
glaciers of Norway and Switzerland. The realization that these set-
tings, although they may bear some resemblance to the Antarctic,
are nevertheless not the Antarctic, is enough of itself to destroy any
sense of drama with which the subject would otherwise be charged.
If I had been in Charles Frend's position I would have done my
best to include some shots from the Ponting film. It would be just a
matter of planning the scenario. Thus by including some of the
stark realities of the original, the film would have taken on a mean-
ing which it now completely lacks.

By comparison, what Marcel Ichac and Languepin brought
back in Greenland can be considered as an example of one of the
two contrasting forms assumed by records of contemporary expedi-
tions, of which With Scott to the South Pole is the forebear. The
preparations for P.-E. Victor's expedition took into account, doubt-
less, certain likely risks but tried to anticipate them as far as possi-
ble. Cinematography was added as a supplementary special service.
Strictly speaking the sequence of the film could have been planned
before the expedition set out as were the day-to-day activities of the
members of the expedition. The director in any case was free to use
his equipment as he saw fit. He was there as an official witness, so
to speak, along with the meteorologist or geologist.

The film by Thor Heyerdahl on the other hand is an example of

159

another kind of reporting, where the film is not an integral part of
the expedition. Kon Tiki manages to be the most beautiful of films
while not being a film at all. Like those moss-covered stones that,
surviving, allow us to reconstruct buildings and statues that no
longer exist, the pictures that are here presented are the remains of
an unfinished creation about which one hardly dares to dream. Let
me explain. Most people are familiar with the extraordinary adven-
tures of a small group of young Norwegian and Swedish scientists
who had decided to prove that, contrary to the general theory,
Polynesia might weE have been populated by sea migrations from
certain parts of the Peruvian coast. The best way to prove their
point was for them to simulate the operation as it might have been
carried out thousands of years ago. Our amateur navigators con-
structed a sort of raft from the oldest documentary information
they could find on the methods employed by the Indians them-
selves. The raft, not being provided with any method of steering,
drifted like flotsam and was carried along by the trade winds to the
Polynesian atolls, a distance of approximately 4500 miles. That this
fabulous expedition should have succeeded after three solitary
months and in the teeth of half a dozen storms is something to
rejoice the spirit, and to be inscribed among present-day miracles.
It reminds one of Melville and Conrad. The travellers brought back
from their journey a book of the highest interest and a collection of
delightfully humorous drawings. Nevertheless, it was evident al-
ready by 1952 that there could be no witness to the stature of the
enterprise comparable to the movie camera. It is precisely this fact
that provides the critic with food for reflection.

Our friends did have a camera. But they were amateurs. Their
knowledge of how to handle it was no better than yours or mine.
Besides they had clearly no intention of putting their film to a
commercial use— as certain unhappy facts prove. For example, they
operated their camera at silent speed, that is to say at 16 frames per
second, while sound projection calls for 24 frames per second. The
result was that every other frame had to be duplicated and the film

160

Cinema and Exploration

in consequence is more jerky than the projection in provincial
cinemas back in 1910. Furthermore the quality of the film is not
helped by errors of exposure and by the subsequent enlargement to
35mm.

But this is by no means the worst of it. In no sense was the
making of a film, even as a sideline, an integral part of the enter-
prise, while the shooting conditions were as bad as they could
possibly be. What I mean by this is that as he lay there curled up
on the edge of the raft at sea level, it was as if the cameraman,
whoever he chanced to be, and the camera were simply of a piece.
Naturally enough, there could be no travelling shots, no dolly shots,
and scarcely a chance to get a full shot of the "vessel" from the little
rubber boat bouncing on the waves astern. Finally, and most im-
portant of all, whenever something of significance occurred, the
onset of a storm for example, the crew were too busy to bother
about running a camera. The result was that our amateur film-
makers simply wasted endless reels filming their pet parrot and the
rations provided by the American armed forces. But when an excit-
ing moment arrives, say a whale hurling itself at the raft, the foot-
age is so short that you have to process it ten times over in the
optical printer before you can even spot what is happening.

Yet somehow Kon Tiki is an admirable and overwhelming film.
Why? Because the making of it is so totally identified with the
action that it so imperfectly unfolds; because it is itself an aspect of
the adventure. Those fluid and trembling images are as it were the
objectivized memory of the actors in the drama. Does the killer
whale, that we can barely see refracted in the water, interest us
because of the rarity of the beast and of the glimpse we get of it,
slight as it is? Or rather is it because the shot was taken at the very
moment when a capricious movement of the monster might well
have annihilated the raft and sent camera and cameraman seven or
eight thousand meters into the deep? The answer is clear. It is not
so much the photograph of the whale that interests us as the photo-
graph of the danger. Nevertheless, the fact remains that we can

161

What Is Cinema?

never feel truly satisfied with just the premature ruins of a film that
was never completed. One is thus set dreaming of the photographic
splendor of the films of Flaherty. Think, for example, of the shots of
the basking sharks of Man of Aran floating drowsily on the Irish
waters. But if we reflect a little further we find ourselves caught
inextricably in a dilemma. What we see is not after all as imperfect
as all that, and for the reason that it does not falsify the conditions
of the experience it recounts. For a film in 35mm with operating
room enough to make a coherently edited work it would have been
necessary to build a different kind of raft, and to make it — why
not — a boat like any other. But the fauna of the Pacific nudging at
the raft was there precisely because it had all the characteristics of
flotsam. An engine and propeller would have put them to flight. A
marine paradise instantly destroyed by science! The fact of the
matter is that this kind of film can actually achieve a more or less
successful compromise between the exigencies of the action and the
demands of reporting. A cinematographic witness to an event is
what a man can seize of it on film while at the same time being part
of it. How much more moving is this flotsam, snatched from the
tempest, than would have been the faultless and complete report
offered by an organized film, for it remains true that this film is not
made up only of what we see — its faults are equally witness to its
authenticity. The missing documents are the negative imprints of
the expedition — its inscription chiselled deep.

It is equally true that there are many missing parts of the film
Annapurna, by Marcel Ichac, especially those out of which the
climax should have been built, namely the final ascent by Herzog,
Lachemal, and Lionel Terray. But we know why they are missing.
An avalanche snatched the camera from the hands of Herzog. It
also dragged off his gloves. Thereafter we miss the scene of the
three men as they depart from Camp Two, and plunge into the
mist, and only pick up the story 36 hours later as they come out of
the clouds, after being blinded twice and with their limbs frostbit-
ten. The modern Orpheus of this ascent to a heE of ice could not

162

Cinema and Exploration

preserve the camera's sight of it. But then begins the long Calvary
of the descent, with Herzog and Lacheraal strapped like mummies
to the backs of their Sherpas. This time the camera is there like the
veil of Veronica pressed to the face of human suffering. Undoubt-
edly the written account by Herzog is more detailed and more
complete. Memory is the most faithful of films — the only one that
can register at any height, and right up to the very moment of
death. But who can fail to see the difference between memory and
that objective image that gives it eternal substance?

163

PAINTING AND CINEMA

films about paintings, at least those that use them to create some-
thing the structure of which is cinematic, meet with an identical
objection from painters and art critics alike. Of such are the short
films of Emmer; Van Gogh by Alain Resnais, R. Hessens, and Gaston
Diehl; Pierre Kast's Goya; and Guernica by Resnais and Hessens.
Their objection, and I myself have heard it from the very lips of an
Inspector General of Drawing of the Department of Education, is
that however you look at it the film is not true to the painting. Its
dramatic and logical unity establishes relationships that are chrono-
logically false and otherwise fictitious, between paintings often
widely separated both in time and spirit. In Guerrieri Emmer actu-
ally goes so far as to include the works of different painters, a form
of cheating hardly less reprehensible than the use by Kast of frag-
ments of Goya's Caprices to bolster the editing of his Misfortunes of
War. The same is true of Resnais when he juggles with the periods
of Picasso's development.

Even should the film-maker wish to conform to the facts of art
history, the instrument he uses would still be aesthetically at odds
with them. As a film-maker he fragments what is by essence a
synthesis while himself working towards a new synthesis never en-
visioned by the painter.

164

Painting and Cinema

One might confine oneself here simply to asking what the justifi-
cation for this is 5 were not a more serious problem involved. Not
only is the film a betrayal of the painter, it is also a betrayal of the
painting and for this reason; the viewer, believing that he is seeing
the picture as painted, is actually looking at it through the instru-
mentality of an art form that profoundly changes its nature. This
was true from the first of black and white. But even color offers no
solution. No one color is ever faithfully reproduced; still less, there-
fore, is any combination of colors. On the other hand, the sequence
of a film gives it a unity in time that is horizontal and, so to speak,
geographical, whereas time in a painting, so far as the notion ap-
plies, develops geologically and in depth. Finally and above all — to
use a more subtle argument that is never employed though it is the
most important of all — space, as it applies to a painting, is radically
destroyed by the screen. Just as footlights and scenery in the the-
ater serve to mark the contrast between it and the real world so, by
its surrounding frame, a painting is separated off not only from
reality as such but, even more so, from the reality that is repre-
sented in it. Indeed it is a mistake to see a picture frame as having
merely a decorative or rhetorical function. The fact that it empha-
sizes the compositional quality of the painting is of secondary im-
portance. The essential role of the frame is, if not to create at least
to emphasize the difference between the microcosm of the picture
and the macrocosm of the natural world in which the painting has
come to take its place. This explains the baroque complexity of the
traditional frame whose job it is to establish something that cannot
be geometrically established — namely the discontinuity between
the painting and the wall, that is to say between the painting and
reality. Whence derives, as Ortega y Gasset has well stated, the
prevalence everywhere of the gilded frame, because it is a material
that gives the maximum of reflection, reflection being that quality
of color, of fight, having of itself no form, that is to say pure
formless color.

In other words the frame of a painting encloses a space that is

165

W hat Is Cinema?

oriented so to speak in a different direction. In contrast to natural
space, the space in which our active experience occurs and border-
ing its outer limits, it offers a space the orientation of which is
inwards, a contemplative area opening solely onto the interior of
the painting.

The outer edges of the screen axe not, as the technical jargon
would seem to imply, the frame of the film image. They are the
edges of a piece of masking that shows only a portion of reality.
The picture frame polarizes space inwards. On the contrary, what
the screen shows us seems to be part of something prolonged indefi-
nitely into the universe. A frame is centripetal, the screen centrif-
ugal. Whence it follows that if we reverse the pictorial process and
place the screen within the picture frame, that is if we show a sec-
tion of a painting on a screen, the space of the painting loses its
orientation and its limits and is presented to the imagination as with-
out any boundaries. Without losing its other characteristics the
painting thus takes on the spatial properties of cinema and be-
comes part of that "picturable" world that lies beyond it on all
sides. It is on this illusion that Luciano Emmer based his fantastic
aesthetic reconstructions, which have served as a starting point for
the existing films of contemporary art, notably for Alain Resnais'
Van Gogh. Here the director has treated the whole of the artist's
output as one large painting over which the camera has wandered
as freely as in any ordinary documentary. From the "Rue d' Aries"
we climb in through the window of Van Gogh's house and go right
up to the bed with the red eiderdown. Resnais has even risked a
reverse shot of an old Dutch peasantwoman entering her house.

Obviously it is easy to pretend that films made this way do
violence to the very nature and essence of painting and that it is
better if Van Gogh has fewer admirers even if they fail to let on
what exactly they admire about him. In short, the argument is that
it is a strange method of cultural dissemination that is based on the
destruction of its very object. This pessimistic outlook, however,

166

Painting and Cinema

does not bear close examination either on pedagogical or, still less,
on aesthetic grounds.

Instead of complaining that the cinema cannot give us paintings
as they really are, should we not rather marvel that we have at last
found an open sesame for the masses to the treasures of the world
of art? As a matter of fact there can be virtually no appreciation or
aesthetic enjoyment of a painting without some form of prior initia-
tion, without some form of pictorial education that allows the spec-
tator to make that effort of abstraction as a result of which he can
clearly distinguish between the mode of existence of the painted
surface and of the world that surrounds him.

Up to the nineteenth century the erroneous doctrine that paint-
ing was simply a way of reproducing the world outside provided
the uninstructed with an opportunity to believe themselves in-
structed and, thereafter, the dramatic episode and the moral tale
multiplied the occasion.

We are well aware that this is no longer the case today, and it is
this which seems to me the deciding factor in favor of the
cinematographic efforts of Luciano Emmer, Henri Storck, Alain
Resnais, Pierre Kast and others — namely that they have found a
way to bring the work of art within the range of everyday seeing so
that a man needs no more than a pair of eyes for the task. In other
words no cultural background, no initiation is needed for instant
enjoyment — and one might add, perforce, of a painting presented
as a phenomenon in nature to the mind's eye by way of the struc-
tural form of the film. The painter should realize that this is in no
sense a retreat from ideals, or a way of doing spiritual violence to
his work, or a return to a realistic and anecdotal concept of paint-
ing. This new method of popularizing painting is not directed in
any essential way against the subject matter and in no sense at all
against the form. Let the painter paint as he wishes. The activity of
the film-maker remains on the outside, realistic of course but — and
this is the great discovery that should make every painter happy — a
realism once removed, following upon the abstraction thai is the

167

painting. Thanks to the cinema and to the psychological properties
of the screen, what is symbolic and abstract takes on the solid
reality of a piece of ore. It should therefore be clear, from now on,
that the cinema not only far from compromising or destroying the
true nature of another art, is, on the contrary, in the process of
saving it, of bringing it to general attention. More than with any
other art, painter and public are far apart. Unless, therefore, we are
going to cling to a kind of meaningless mandarinism, how can we
fail to be delighted that painting will now become an open book to
the masses and without the expense of creating a whole culture. If
such economy shocks the cultural Malthusians let them reflect that
it could also spare us an artistic revolution — that of "realism" which
has its own special way of making painting available to the people.

What of the purely aesthetic objections? As distinct from the
pedagogical aspect of the question, these derive clearly from a
misunderstanding that demands from the film-maker something
other than what he has in mind. Actually Van Gogh and Goya are
not, or are not exclusively at least, a new rendering of the work of
these two painters. Here the role of the cinema is not the subordi-
nate and didactic one of photographs in an album or of a film
projected as part of a lecture. These films are works in their own
right. They are their own justification. They are not to be judged by
comparing them to the paintings they make use of, rather by the
anatomy or rather the histology of this newborn aesthetic creature,
fruit of the union of painting and cinema. The objections I raised
earlier are in reality a way of giving definition to the new laws
following upon this mating. The role of cinema here is not that of a
servant nor is it to betray the painting. Rather it is to provide it
with a new form of existence. The film of a painting is an aesthetic
symbiosis of screen and painting, as is the lichen of the algae and
mushroom.

To be annoyed by this is as ridiculous as to condemn the opera
on behalf of theater and music.

168

Painting and Cinema

It is nevertheless true that this new form has about it something
definitely of our time, and which the traditional comparison I have
just made does not take into account. Films of paintings are not
animation films. What is paradoxical about them is that they use an
already completed work sufficient unto itself. But it is precisely
because it substitutes for the painting a work one degree removed
from it, proceeding from something already aesthetically formu-
lated, that it throws a new light on the original. It is perhaps to the
extent that the film is a complete work and as such, seems therefore
to betray the painting most, that it renders it in reality the greater
service.

I must prefer Van Gogh or Guernica to Rubens or to the film
From Renoir to Picasso by d'Haesaerts which aims only at being
instructive or critical. I say this not only because the freedom that
Resnais has allowed himself preserves the ambiguity, the poly-
valence characteristic of all truly creative works, but also and su-
premely because this creation is the best critic of the original. It is
in pulling the work apart, in breaking up its component parts, in
making an assault on its very essence that the film compels it to
deliver up some of its hidden powers. Did we really know, before
we saw Resnais' film, what Van Gogh looked like stripped of his
yellows? It is of course a risky business and we see how dangerous
from those films of Emmer which are less effective. The film-maker
runs a risk, through artificial and mechanical dramatization, of giv-
ing us an anecdote instead of a painting. One must also take into
account, however, that success depends on the talent of the director
and on how deep is his understanding of the picture.

There is also a certain type of literary criticism which is likewise
a re-creation — Baudelaire on Delacroix, Vatery on Baudelaire, Mal-
raux on Greco. Let us not blame the cinema for human foibles and
sins. Films about painting, once the prestige that comes from sur-
prise and discovery has faded, will be worth precisely as much as
the men who make them.

169

NOTES

SOURCES AND TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

THE ONTOLOGY OF THE PHOTOGRAPHIC IMAGE
From Problemes de la Peinture, 1945

THE MYTH OF TOTAL CINEMA
From Critique, 1946

p. 17, Concours Lepine.

Annual exposition of inventions, at which awards are given to en-
courage French artisans and inventors. First organized in 1903 by an
association of inventors and manufacturers, following an earlier ex-
position inaugurated by Louis Lepine.

p. 19, image on retina.

The notion of the retention of the image on the retina seems now to
be discarded in favor of a new theory giving greater importance to
the part played by the brain.

p. 20, P. Potoniee.

The dream of creating a living human being by means other than
natural reproduction has been a preoccupation of man from time
immemorial: hence such myths as Pygmalion and Galatea. Serious
medieval natural philosophers such as Albertus Magnus (master to
Aquinas) concerned themselves with the possibility, The creation of
the homunculus is a recurrent theme in literature and has appeared
in such films as The Golem. It was doubtless a kindred desire that

173

What Is Cinema?

led early viewers of the film to exclaim, "It is life itself," such was
the impact of the supreme form of trompe-l'oeil.

p. 20, Chevreul.

Chevreul, the subject of the interview, was a French chemist (1786-
1889) who invented a theory of color from which the Impressionist
painters drew inspiration.

EVOLUTION OF THE LANGUAGE OF CINEMA

A composite of three articles: the first written for a Venice Festival
anniversary booklet, Twenty Years of Film (1952); the second "Ed-
iting and Its Evolution," Age Nouveau, No. 92, July, 1955; and the
third in Cahiers du Cinima, No. 7, 1950

THE VIRTUES AND LIMITATIONS OF MONTAGE
From Cahiers du Cinema, 1953 and 1957

p. 43, Jean Tourane.

Director who made actors out of animals in stories in which they
played human roles. He made two short films, Saturnin le pokte, the
hero of which was a duck, and Le Lac aux fees, featuring rabbits, a
fox, a goat, and so on. He later made a feature film in the same style,
Une Fie pas comme les autres.

IN DEFENSE OF MIXED CINEMA
From Cinema, un oeil ouvert sur le monde

p. 65, Madame de La Fayette.

French woman of letters (1634—1693), author of La Princesse de
Cleves and of Memoires — an interesting account of the French court.

THEATER AND CINEMA (Part I)
From Esprit, June, 1951.

p. 79, Boireau and Onesime.

The former is a character taken from a comic paper — a maladroit
clown round whom a famous early serial was built. The latter was
the central figure of an earlier comic serial.

p. 79, Jean Hytier.

A penetrating critic of contemporary French literature, author of a
study of Andre Gide.

174

Notes

p. 81, Henri Gouhier.

A professor at the Sorbonne, well-known authority on the theater;
author of L'Essence du thiatre and Le Thidtre et I 'existence.

THEATER AND CINEMA {Part 11)
From Esprit, July-August, 1951

p. 104, Christian Berard.

A French painter (1902-1949) whom Louis Jouvet and Jean Coc-
teau persuaded, with some difficulty, to undertake designing theater
sets. He designed sets for La Voix humaine (1930) and La Machine
infernal (1934). He also created the sets lor Cocteau's film La Belle
et la bete. His illustrations of the works of Rimbaud are well known.

p. 114, Martenot waves.

"Name of a radio-electrical instrument which was an advance oo the
theremin. It is one of many electro-phonic instruments on which, at
will, the player may make notes whose origin is to be traced to
electro-magnetic vibrations ultimately converted into sound waves by
some form of loudspeaker." — Groves' Dictionary of Music, Vol. 2.

p. 118, Jean Vilar.

Well-known French actor, formerly director of the Theatre Nationale
Populaire, which gives open-air performances in Provence in the
summer, between regular seasons in Paris.

JOURNAL D'UN CURE DE CAMPAGNE AND THE STYLE

OF ROBERT BRESSON

From Cahiers du Cinema, No. 3, 1951

p. 126, line 9.

Does Bazin really mean "those happy few," sarcastically, or has his
memory failed him when he actually meant "this baod of brothers"?

p. 129, Jacques le fataliste el son maitre.

A novel by Diderot (1713-1784), the Encyclopedist. The novel is in

the line descending from Rabelais by way of Cervantes and Laurence
Sterne, with acknowledged borrowings from the latter's Tristram
Shandy.

175

What Is Cinema?

p. 134, . . the deadly Nessus-mantle of the old Adam."
Here is a remarkable example of Bazin's capacity for compression.
In one adjectival phrase he combines pagan and Christian legend.
Nessus was the centaur who gave Deinira, wife of Heracles, a poisoned
garment with which she unwittingly caused the death of her husband,
thus avenging Nessus' own death at the hands of Heracles.

p. 134, "Kierkegaardian repetition."

A notion involved in Kierkegaardian religious existentialism. It in-
volves finding what has been lost. It bears some comparison to the
Platonic view of the truth as "recollection," but is different as to the
temporal perspective involved. Recollection is oriented to the past,
repetition to the future,

p. 143, Viollet-le-Duc.

French architect and author (1814-1879) and restorer of ancient
churches and buildings, such as Notre Dame and La Sainte Chapelle.
His doctrine was that a building should be restored less according to
the condition in which it was found than according to the architec-
tonic principles from which its forms derived. The conclusions drawn
by him and his disciples were frequently criticized less for their own
sake than because their application would not allow for any alterna-
tives.

CHARLIE CHAPLIN
From D.O.C., 1948

CINEMA AND EXPLORATION

A combination of two articles that appeared in France-Observateur in
April, 1953, and January, 1956.

p. 156, Salle Pleyel.

A well-known Paris concert-hall (named after the Austrian composer)
often used for the showing of travel films.

PAINTING AND CINEMA

Source unknown; not given in French edition

176

INDEX

INDEX

Adventurer, The, 146 ff.
Afrique vous parle, L', 155
Agel, Henri, 132
Alice in Wonderland, 42
Allemania Anno Zero, 37
Altmann, Georges, 55
Andersen, Hans Christian, 42
Anges du pichi, Les, 132
Annapurna, 162
Antoine, Andre\ 89
Arnoul, Franfoise, 117
Astaire, Fred, 28
Astruc, Alexandre, 4
Aurenche, 127, 143
Auiant-Lara, Claude, 67, 93

Back Street, 28

Ballon rouge, Le, 42 ff.

Barrault, Jean-Louis, 120

Baty, Gaston, 111

Baudelaire, Charles, 107, 169

Beguin, Alfred, 68

Benoit, Pierre, 63

Berard, Christian, 104

Bergman, Ingrid, 92

Bernanos, Georges, 68, 75, 126 ff.

Bernhardt, Sarah, 118 n., 123

Bernstein, Henry, 115

Berthomieu, A., 76

Best Years of Our Lives, The, 71

Bite humaine, La, 34
Bim, le petit &ne, 41
Boireau, 79 ff.
Bordeaux, Henri, 63
Bost, Pierre, 127, 141
Boudu sauve des eaux, 83
Bourgeois, Jacques, 65
Bourget, Paul, 62

Bresson, Robert, 7, 23, 54, 68, 75,

125 ff.
Brighton Rock, 64
Broken Blossoms, 33, 70
Brothers Karamazov, 83
Buffon, G.L.L.,43

Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 109, 139
Caldwell, Erskine, 61
Camus, Albert, 64
Canudo, R., 7
Came, Marcel, 29, 32
Casares, Maria, 133
Caves du Vatican, Les, 82
Cendrars, Blaise, 155
Cezanne, Paul, 16

Chaplin, Charlie, 7, 52, 71, 72, 79 f.,

115, 121, 144 ff.
Chardin, 13

Chartreuse de Parme, Le, 65 ff.
Cheat, The, 39
Chevreul, M. E., 20

179

What Is Cinema?

Cimbo, 154
Circus, The, 52

Citizen Kane, 33, 36, 37, 52, 64, 70,
113

Clouzot, H. G., 25

Cocteau, Jean, 46, 69, 84, 90 ff., 95,

101 n., 112, 116, 123, 129
Condition humaine, La, 64
Congorilla, 154
Comeille, Pierre, 54, 98
Cravene, Marcel, 103
Crin Blanc, 41 ff.
Croisidre Noire, La, 154
Cyrano de Bergerac, 82

Da Vinci, Leonardo, 11, 60

Dames du Bois de Boulogne, Les, 7,

53, 110, 125, 129 ff.
Danse de la mort, La, 103
Daumier, Honore, 152
Day's Pleasure, A, 145
Degas, Edgar, 119
Delacroix, Eugfcne, 169
Dellanoy, Jean, 68
Delluc, Louis, 7
Demeny, 17
De Mille, C. B., 39
De Nerval, 132
Descartes, Rene, 19 n., 43
De Sica, Vittorio, 37
Diable au corps, he, 53, 66 f., 126,

127, 141
Diderot, Denis, 7, 129 ff.
Die hi, Gaston, 164
Disney, Walt, 41,43
Dos Passos, John, 61 ff.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 28
Dreyer, Carl Theodore, 23, 28, 38,

103, 106, 109 ff., 133, 138
Dumas, Alexandre, 53
Duvivier, Jean, 29

Easy Street, 144 ff.
Edison, Thomas, 17 ff .
Eisenstein, Sergei, 12 n., 25
Eldorado, 139

Emmer, Luciano, 142, 164 ff., 166f.
End of St. Petersburg, 32
Entree des Artistes, V, 133

Espoir, L', 82, 113
Etranger, L', 64
Eve future, L', 20

Fallen Idol, The, 66, 70
Fantdmas, 57
Fauchois, Rend, 83

Fee pas comme les autres, Une, 42 ff.

Fernandel, 86

Feuillade, Louis, 59

Feydeau, Ernest, 115

Feyder, Jacques, 29

Flaherty, Robert, 26, 38, 162

Flaubert, Gustave, 66, 67

For Whom the Bell Tolls, 63 ff.

Ford, John, 29, 35, 64

Frankenstein, 28

Frend, Charles, 158 ff.

Freud, Sigmund, 42

Fromentin, 62

Fury, 32

Gance, Abel, 25, 26, 72, 85

Garbo, Greta, 74, 118

General Line, The, 25, 55

Gide, Andre, 65, 68, 82

Giotto, 56

Gold Rush, The, 70

Gouhier, Henri, 6, 15, 81, 95, 108

Goya, 164

Grande illusion, La, 34

Greco, El, 169

Greed, 28, 138

Greene, Graham, 61 ff.

Greenland, 158 ff.

Griffith, D. W., 24, 25, 27, 33, 52

Guernica, 164 ff.

Guerrieri, 164

Hallelujah!, 72

Hamlet, 55, 59, 69 ff., 75, 76, 84, 93,

110n„ Ill, 113
Hellman, Lillian, 77, 84
Hemingway, Ernest, 61 ff.
Henry V, 76, 84, 87, 88, 93, 112, 114,

116, 119 ff., 123 n.
Hessens, R., 164
Heyerdahl, Thor, 159
Hitchcock, Alfred, 39, 51
Hugo, Jean, 103, 109

180

Index

Hugo, Victor, 53, 132
Hytier, Jean, 79

I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang,
28

Ichac, Marcel, 158, 162
Idiot, L', 66
Informer, The, 28
Intolerance, 33
Invisible Man, The, 28
// Happened One Night, 72

Jacque, Christian, 65
Jacques le fataliste, 1, 53, 129
Jean de la lune, 76

Jeanne d'Arc, See La Passion de

Jeanne d'Arc
Jezebel, 28, 29
My, 17

Jour se live, Le, 29, 32, 71

Journal d'un cur 4 de campagne, Le,

53, 54, 66, 68, 75, 125 ff.
Joyce, James, 64

Kast, Pierre, 164 ff.

Keaton, Buster, 52, 72, 80, 121

King Solomon's Mines, 155

Kon Tiki, 159 If.

Kuleshov, Lev, 25, 31, 36, 37, 43

La Fontaine, Jean de, 42, 44, 54, 81

Ladri di Biciclette, 37, 64, 133

La Fayette, Madame Marie-Madeleine

de, 56, 65
Lamiral, Nicole, 132 ff.
Lamorisse, Albert, 41 ff.
Lang, Fritz, 32
Langlois, Henri, 59
Laurel and Hardy, 80
Lautr£amont, Comte de, 71
Le Brun, Charles, 10
Leger, Guy, 2
Leroy, 17

Letraze, Jean de, 115 ff,

Linder, Max, 78 ff.

Little Foxes, The, 34, 69, 76, 84, 93

Lloyd, Harold, 72

Loin de Rueil, 61

Lone White Sails, 41

Louisiana Story, 51

Lumi&re, Louis, 12, 17 ff., 34, 45

Mac (Man, Pierre, 155
Macbeth, 69, 76, 84, 93, 111, 114
Madame Bovary, 66, 83, 141
Magnificent Ambersons, The, 34, 50,
52

Mallarme, Stdphane, 132, 141
Malraux, Andre, 10, 24, 56, 61 ff., 119,

169

Man of Aran, 102, 162
Manet, Edouard, 119
Manhattan Transf er, 64
Marey, E. J., 17, 22
Marx Brothers, 28
Maupassant, 67
Mauri ac, Fransois, 92
Medecin malgri lui, Le, 85, 87
M61ies, Georges, 20, 78
Melodic der Welt, 155
Melville, Jean-Pierre, 138
Merimee, Prosper, 84 n.
Michaelangelo, 56, 60
Misanthrope, Le, 71
Misirables, Les, 53
Misfortunes of War, 164
Mitry, Jean, 5
Mix, Tom, 48
Moana, 155
Modern Times, 150ff.
Moliere, 54, 71, 85, 98, 106, 115
Monsieur Verdoux, 71
Monte Crista, Count of, 53
Morand, Paul, 155
Moszhukhin, 25, 26, 37, 43
Mounet-Sully (Jean-Sully Mounet),
122

Mourning Becomes Electra, 93
Mr. Arkadin, 50

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, 28
Murnau, F. W., 26, 38, 39, 109
Muybridge, Eadweard, 17, 18
Mystere Picasso, Le, 142 n.

Nadar, 20

Nanook, 27, 50, 51, 102, 154
Nattier, Nathalie, 117
Nibelungen, Die, 109 ff., 139

181

What Is Cinema?

Niepce.Nicephore, 11, 12, 17, 18
Nosferatu, 27, 109, 139
Notorious, 92

Occupe-toi d'Amilie, 84, 93

Oedipus, 58

Of Mice and Men, 81

Olivier, Laurence, 54, 87, 88, 95, 98,

UOn., Ill, 112, 116, 123
One AM., 147
Onisime, 79 ff.
Ortega y Gasset, Jose\ 165

Pagnol, Marcel, 76, 78, 89 n., 99, 103,

114, 116 ff., 124
Paha, 37, 64
Palissy, Berard, 22

Parents terribles, Les, 69 f., 76, 84,
85, 90 ff., 303, 112, 113, 116, 120

Partie de campagne, Une, 66, 141

Pascal, Blaise, 19 n.

Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, La, 28, 103,
106, 109, 133, 139

Pawnshop, The, 146

Philipe, Gerard, 118 n.

Picasso, Pablo, 13, 164

Pilgrim, The, 55, 144 f .

Plateau, J. A. F., 18

Plautus, 80

Poe, Edgar Allan, 67, 132
Pokier, Leon, 154
Pooling, H. G., 154 ff.
Potemkin, 70, 72
Potoniee, P., 20
Power and the Glory, The. 64
Premieres desillusions, Les, 66 ff.
Proust, Marcel, 65
Pudovkin, V. I., 73

Quai des Brumes, he, 32
Quai des Orfevres, Le, 25
Queneau, Raymond, 61

Racine, Jean, 7, 72, 82, 106, 115, 122,
130

Radiguet, Raymond, 67
Raimu, 86
Rank, J, Arthur, 41
Raphael, 60

Recherche du temps perdu, A la, 65

Regie du jeu, La, 34, 38, 71, 106

Rembrandt, 56

Rendez-vous de juillet, 155

Renoir, Augusie, 1 19

Renoir, Jean, 6, 23, 29, 30, 34, 38, 66,

67, 83, 128, 139, 141
Resnais, Alain, 142, 164 ff,
Reynaud, Emile, 18, 20
Rimbaud, 141
Rin-Tin-Tin, 44, 48
Rink, The, 153
River, The, 141
Rohmer, Eric, 4
Rope, 51, 84
Rosenkrantz, 99 ff., 112
Rossellini, Roberto, 37
Roue, La, 25
Rogers, Ginger. 28
Rousseau, J.-J., 42
Rubens, 169

Ruttmann, Walther, 155

Sadoul, Georges, 17

Sang d'un poete, Le, 46, 101 n.

Saroyan, William, 64

Sartre, J.-P., 92, 102

Scarface, 28, 70, 72

Scott of the Antarctic, 157 ff.

Segur, Comtesse de, 42

Sennett, Mack, 72

Shadow of a Doubt, 92

Shakespeare, 57, 75, 88, 106, 115, 119

Shoulder Arms, 149

Silence de la mer, 138

Stagecoach, 28, 29, 70, 72, 103

Stendhal, 65

Storck, Henri, 167

Stroheim, See Von Stroheim

Sunny side, 146

Sunrise, 27, 72

Symphonie pastorale, La, 53, 66 ff.,
141

Tabu, 21, 155
Tales of Perrault, 42
Tartan, 155
Tellenay, Louis, 4
Terence, 80

182

Index

Thevenot, lean, 154

Thomas Gamer, 64

Tintoretto, 12 n.

Topaze, 116 if.

Touch ard, P. A., 2, 101 n.

Toulouse-Lautrec, Henry de, U9

Tourane, Jean, 43 f.

Trader Horn, 155

Trow Mousque (aires, Les, 53

Truffaut, Francois, 4

Valentino, Rudolph, 74
Valery, Paul, 127, 169
Vampires, Les, 59
Van Gogh, 71,142, 166 ff.
Vermeer, 46
Verne, Jules, 42
Very, Pierre, 54
Victor, P. E., 157 ff.
Vigo, Jean, 67
Vilar, Jean, 103, ll8n
VUHers de lisle-Adam, August, corate
de, 20

Viollet-le-Duc, Eugene, 143
Visconti, Luchino, 37
Voltaire, 72, 122
Von Frisch, 43

Von Stroheim, Erich, 23, 26, 27, 38,

39,73, 138 ff.
Voyageur sans baggages, Le, 76, 82,

107

Weine, R., 109

Welles, Orson, 23, 33 f., 50, 89 n., 95,

101, 111, 123
Where No Vultures Fly, 49 n.
White Shadows in the South Seas, 155
With Scott to the South Pole, 154, 157
Wood, Sam, 64
Wright, Teresa, 92
Wyler, William, 29, 33 ff., 69, 77, 84

Zavattini, Cesare, 37
Zecca, Ferdinand, 34, 57
Zukor, Adolph, 78

183

Film

$6.95

bazin

HI iS < l\l 11 1.»

"It is said that Andre Bazin singlehandedly brought the French film
back to life by inspiring Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut and Alain
Resnais to attempt the impossible; convinced by him that it was pos-
sible, they did it. That begins to touch on why this book should be
read even by non-readers who love movies. Critical intelligence like
Bazin's, applied to movies with dedication and knowledge, is neces-
sary to the art. It can revitalize it.

"Bazin must be read for the beauty of his argument. He has a genius
for argument. His great gift is that the argument does not stay on the
page; the reader fights back, sometimes finding that Bazin has antici-
pated his objections and covered them in the next paragraph. He gets
involved in a running battle that is an extraordinary, elating experience.

"The ten essays that Hugh Gray has selected for this first collection
of Bazin's work to appear in English raise enough critical issues about
how shots should be composed and edited and the relationship of
movies to theater, to the novel, to painting, to documentary footage,
to keep young film-makers exhilarated and arguing into perpetuity—
maybe even into some work testing his ideas.

"What is Cinema? joins that small company of books on movies
that do not exploit interest in movies but intensify it."— Pauline Kael in
the New York Times Book Review

"Some of the most interesting general ideas on the nature of
cinema since Arnheim and some of the finest appreciations of specific
films and artists since Agee. "—Dwight Macdonald

BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA 94720

FORNIA PRESS

ISBN □-SEQ-DD0 c IE-7